Politics & Power Quote by Alistair Cooke

Cooke’s line lands because it’s a double-edged compliment: a jab at British cultural gatekeeping and an equally sharp poke at America’s talent for exporting the very thing elites claim to hate. “As always” is doing quiet but lethal work here. It frames the cycle as ritual, not exception - a predictable choreography of shuddering disdain followed by eager consumption once the rough edges have been sanded down, rebranded, or simply made inevitable by repetition.

The word “especially” tilts the target toward Britain’s class-coded reflexes. “Vulgarity” isn’t just about taste; it’s a social signal, a way to police who gets to define culture as respectable. Cooke, a British-born journalist who became a kind of transatlantic translator, knew both the British habit of treating American mass culture as a contamination and the British appetite for it once it’s been safely digested. The “two years later” punchline captures the lag between moral panic and market reality: first comes offense, then the slow conversion of offense into fashion.

The subtext is less anti-British than anti-pretension. Cooke is mocking the posture of recoil that disguises envy and curiosity, and he’s exposing how “vulgarity” often just means “new, popular, and not vetted by the right people.” It also hints at a deeper power shift in the 20th century: America sets the tempo, Britain pretends not to hear it, then finds itself humming along anyway.