Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Keys Moran

Moran’s line reads like a diagnosis delivered with a novelist’s knack for clean, ruthless symmetry: first America as credulous patient, then as paranoid one, each ailment producing the same disability. The sentence is engineered around a hinge - “and since then” - that turns institutional betrayal into a cultural reflex. Watergate and Viet Nam aren’t just historical events here; they’re origin stories for a new national personality, the moment authority stopped being an assumption and became a suspect.

The specific intent is less nostalgia for a vanished innocence than a warning about epistemic whiplash. Moran isn’t praising the pre-scandal public; “believed everything” is already an indictment. He’s pointing at the way propaganda and secrecy don’t merely win a news cycle - they rewire the audience. When citizens learn they were lied to at scale, skepticism becomes a moral posture. Eventually it hardens into identity: disbelieving “anything” feels safer than risking naïveté again.

The subtext is about power and self-protection. Institutions that treat truth as optional train the public to treat truth as unattainable. That creates a perverse equilibrium where accountability gets harder, because every claim sounds like spin, every fact feels like someone’s agenda. Moran’s final clause - “prevent us from recognizing the truth” - is the sting: democracy doesn’t collapse only when people are fooled; it also collapses when people stop believing that “truth” is a usable category. The cultural context is late-20th-century America moving from broadcast-era trust to post-scandal cynicism, a shift that still shapes how we process wars, elections, and expertise.