Politics & Power Quote by Dick Morris

Morris compresses an entire election cycle into a neat, fatalistic squeeze play: Democrats can’t embrace tax cuts, voters won’t tolerate tax hikes, so everyone is trapped. The line works because it pretends to be neutral political arithmetic while quietly smuggling in a worldview where “tax cut” is popular common sense and “tax increase” is electoral suicide. That framing isn’t descriptive so much as coercive: it pressures Democrats to accept the tax-cut baseline or be branded unelectable.

The subtext is about permission structures. Morris isn’t merely predicting party behavior; he’s policing it. By asserting what Democrats are “not about to” do, he casts deviation as heresy inside the coalition. By declaring what “Americans are not going to” do, he invokes a monolithic electorate that conveniently aligns with anti-tax ideology. It’s a rhetorical trick with a long pedigree in campaign commentary: turn contingent political outcomes into iron laws, so policy debate looks like naive fantasy.

Context matters because Morris’s brand is the insider-operator turned pundit, selling politics as hard-nosed realism. The sentence reads like a consultant’s memo translated for cable news: simple, absolute, and built for repetition. What it leaves out is the whole terrain where tax policy actually lives or dies - which taxes, on whom, for what purpose, under what economic conditions. By stripping away those specifics, Morris turns “tax increase” into a cultural taboo rather than a budget choice, and he turns strategy into destiny.