Politics & Power Quote by Gore Vidal

Decadence, for Vidal, isn’t pearls and champagne; it’s the slow moral rot that shows up first in the mouth. His target is a culture that has stopped arguing honestly about power and started laundering it through euphemism. The line hits because it treats language not as a neutral tool but as an early-warning system: when a society can no longer justify what it’s doing, it changes what it calls what it’s doing.

Vidal’s killer example - “you liberate a city by destroying it” - compresses an entire playbook of modern empire into one obscene oxymoron. “Liberate” is a halo word: it borrows the prestige of freedom and drapes it over rubble. The subtext is that violence doesn’t just kill bodies; it also kills meaning. Once “liberation” can mean annihilation, words become weapons aimed at the public’s moral reflexes.

The election-time jab sharpens the diagnosis: decadent language isn’t accidental sloppiness, it’s a governing strategy. Confusion is not a bug but the feature that makes self-sabotaging consent possible. Vidal implies that citizens aren’t simply duped by a single lie; they’re submerged in a vocabulary engineered to make contradictions feel normal and cruelty feel pragmatic.

Context matters: Vidal wrote across the Cold War and Vietnam era into the age of permanent campaigns, when public relations, television sound bites, and national-security rhetoric turned politics into a battle over framing. His cynicism is calibrated, not theatrical: if you want to know what a country is becoming, listen to what it forces its words to excuse.