Politics & Power Quote by Cal Thomas

America’s most dangerous diseases “developed an immunity to politics” is a deliberately biological put-down of Washington’s favorite self-myth: that every social crisis is just one more problem to be managed, lobbied, and legislated into submission. Cal Thomas, a journalist steeped in late-20th-century culture-war argument, frames politics as a medicine that no longer works because the patient has adapted. The metaphor does two things at once: it flatters the reader’s exhaustion with partisan theater, and it insinuates that political solutions are not merely inadequate but categorically misapplied.

Then comes the turn: “We suffer not from a failure of political organization or power, but a failure of love.” That pivot smuggles a moral diagnosis under the guise of plainspoken realism. “Organization” and “power” evoke institutions, parties, movements; “love” evokes duties that can’t be outsourced to the state. The subtext is skeptical of technocratic reform and implicitly sympathetic to religious or communitarian ethics, where social repair starts with the heart, the family, the church, the neighbor.

It’s also a rhetorical trapdoor. If the core problem is “love,” critics can be dismissed as rearranging bureaucratic furniture while the house burns. Yet the line’s strength is also its vulnerability: “love” is a compelling standard precisely because it’s hard to measure and easy to invoke. Thomas’s intent isn’t to end politics; it’s to demote it, arguing that the deepest American ailments are spiritual and cultural, and that policy without empathy becomes another symptom.