Politics & Power Quote by Jerry Rubin

Rubin is anatomizing how movements get shrink-wrapped into vocabulary that’s more useful for policing than understanding. The line isn’t just a complaint about name-calling; it’s a map of how the state, the media, and even fellow activists turn politics into a taxonomy. “Pig” names the police as an occupying force; “liberal” is a demotion from danger to decorum; “radical” and “revolutionary” are escalators of threat. By the time “everybody had a label,” the argument is already lost, replaced by sorting.

The dark joke lands in the second sentence: revolution gets reduced to inventory. “If you had everything but a gun” reads like a punchline about America’s peculiar moral accounting, where commitment is measured by proximity to violence. Rubin exposes a trap laid for dissenters in the late-60s/early-70s: you’re tolerated as long as you’re symbolically transgressive but practically containable. The minute you cross into “revolutionary,” you invite surveillance, prosecution, infiltration. Yet if you don’t, you risk being dismissed as performative.

Context matters: Rubin, a Yippie showman as much as an organizer, understood politics as theater and repression as stagecraft. Labels function like costumes handed out by opponents: once you’re dressed as “radical,” every action reads as menace; once you’re dressed as “liberal,” you’re expected to negotiate yourself into harmlessness. The quote’s intent is both warning and dare: resist the categories, and notice how quickly America demands a gun to take your politics seriously.