Politics & Power Quote by Dalton Trumbo

Trumbo doesn’t describe democracy as a flag to salute; he frames it as a system that makes polite society uneasy. The insistent repetition of “All the people” is doing the real work here, like a hammer on a nail: the point isn’t abstract freedom, it’s the maddening inclusivity of it. Democracy, in his telling, is measured by who gets to participate when participation feels inconvenient, embarrassing, or culturally threatening.

The quote’s genius is its deliberate plainness. Trumbo avoids lofty constitutional poetry and instead catalogs three everyday arenas where power gets policed: speech, voting, worship. That triad reads like a civics lesson, but the punchline is the last clause: “voodoo doctors as well.” It’s a provocation aimed at the reflexive hierarchy of “respectable” belief. By pairing Christians and Jews with a caricatured outsider religion, Trumbo exposes a common liberal dodge: celebrating tolerance in theory while quietly limiting it to groups we already deem legitimate.

Context sharpens the edge. Trumbo was blacklisted in mid-century Hollywood for his politics, living through a period when “democracy” was constantly invoked as an anti-communist brand while dissenters were surveilled, fired, and forced to grovel. Read against that history, the quote functions as a rebuttal to democracy-as-marketing. If your commitment evaporates when the speaker is radical, the voter is poor, or the worshipper is strange, Trumbo implies you don’t have democracy; you have permission slips handed out by the powerful.