Politics & Power Quote by Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day’s line lands like a polite sentence with a knife inside it. On the surface, she’s doing the respectable American thing: disagreeing with Communists, filing them alongside “other political parties.” But that last clause detonates the piety. She doesn’t say parties that threaten the American way of life; she says parties “trying to maintain” it. The implication is that the maintenance itself is suspect - that “the American way” is not a neutral inheritance but an ideology being actively defended, often with coercion, exclusion, and moral self-congratulation.

Day’s intent is double: to refuse Communist doctrine while also refusing the patriotic blackmail that treats anti-Communism as a blank check for whatever the state and its allied institutions want to preserve. It’s a rhetorical judo move. By placing the Communist Party and mainstream parties on the same grammatical plane, she drains the Cold War script of its moral hierarchy and replaces it with her own Catholic Worker lens: the real question isn’t which team you’re on, but what your politics do to the poor, the worker, the prisoner, the drafted.

The subtext is Day’s lifelong distrust of “order” when it masquerades as virtue. Her activism sat in an uncomfortable in-between - critical of Soviet atheism and authoritarianism, equally critical of American capitalism, militarism, and the sanctification of property. In a period when dissent was easily recast as treason, she makes disagreement a moral constant, not a partisan hobby. The line works because it sounds like a concession while quietly stripping “American way of life” of its halo.