Politics & Power Quote by Spiro T. Agnew

Agnew’s line doesn’t argue for public safety so much as it weaponizes the public’s fear of disorder. The pairing is deliberately lopsided: a “policeman’s truncheon” is blunt, physical, and familiar; an “anarchist’s bomb” is indiscriminate, cinematic, and terrifying. He’s not weighing two imperfect options so much as forcing a moral reflex. Pick the club, or you’re siding with the explosive.

The specific intent is classic law-and-order triangulation: legitimize aggressive policing by framing it as the only sane alternative to chaos. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with protests, riots, and political violence in the air, the Nixon-Agnew message to the “silent majority” was that authority may be rough, but dissent is existentially dangerous. The subtext is that civil liberties are negotiable when the other side can be labeled “anarchist.” It also blurs a crucial distinction: the truncheon implies targeted force; the bomb implies mass terror. Once those are your two nouns, due process and proportionality stop being questions and start being luxuries.

Rhetorically, the line is a pressure tactic aimed at moderates: you may dislike police brutality, Agnew suggests, but you’ll dislike lawlessness more. It’s an early template for a now-familiar political move: redefine the debate so that state power appears as mere restraint, while opposition becomes pathology. The genius, and the danger, is how quickly that reframing turns dissent into a public-safety threat.