Politics & Power Quote by Malcolm Bradbury

Bradbury’s line lands like a cocktail-party provocation, but it’s doing real cultural work: it reduces two national mythologies to one family psychodrama, then lets the insult carry the analysis. “Liking” and “hating” are deliberately juvenile verbs for the grand pageant of History, shrinking empires and revolutions down to a son’s mood. That’s the point. He’s mocking how nations narrate themselves not as messy coalitions of interests, class pressures, and accidents, but as emotional origin stories with a patriarch at the center.

The England half leans on continuity: monarchy, inherited institutions, the fetish of precedent. “Men liking their fathers” isn’t literal affection; it’s the cultural habit of treating the past as a house you renovate rather than a structure you condemn. The American half flips into rupture. The founding is framed as an Oedipal break from the “father” (the Crown, the Old World, tradition itself), and Bradbury pushes it further: not just leaving home, but torching it, then calling the arson liberty.

Subtext: these are gendered histories, told as contests of masculine legitimacy. “Men” signals who gets to be the protagonist, whose conflicts count as national destiny, whose resentment becomes ideology. Bradbury, writing as a British novelist with an eye on transatlantic self-mythmaking, is also needling American exceptionalism: the claim to perpetual newness can look, from the outside, like a compulsion to declare every generation a revolution. It’s funny because it’s too neat, and it stings because it isn’t.