Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Delors

Delors isn’t praising Hollywood; he’s diagnosing a national reflex. By saying cinema “explains American society,” he frames the U.S. less as a complex polity than as a story machine that trains citizens to read reality in genre shorthand. The Western is the giveaway: a moral universe built on clarity, velocity, and violence-adjacent problem-solving, where ambiguity is treated as weakness and compromise as contamination. It’s not just that America likes heroes and villains. It’s that the culture’s dominant narrative form makes that division feel natural, even virtuous.

The line “where the weak don’t have a place” lands like an economist’s cold weather report. Delors is pointing to the social policy underside of a mythic frontier ethos: if you can’t ride, shoot, or sell, you’re scenery. In European terms, it’s a critique of thin safety nets and a suspicion of solidarity; in cinematic terms, it’s a script that edits out structural causes and replaces them with personal character arcs. Poverty becomes a failure of grit, not a product of institutions.

Context matters: Delors, a key architect of the European social model and integration, is speaking from a tradition that treats the state as a guarantor of social cohesion. His jab at America is also a defense of Europe: a reminder that politics should resist the seductive simplicity of a two-gun narrative. The subtext is a warning about exported storytelling too: when your culture’s default plot is “good guys vs bad guys,” foreign policy starts to look like casting.