Politics & Power Quote by Johann Most

“Fortunately” is the tell: a grin tucked inside a grenade. Johann Most isn’t diagnosing America with anarchism; he’s celebrating America as an unusually fertile medium for it, the way a firebug praises a drought. The line works because it flips the patriotic self-image. “Present-day America” is typically sold as exceptional because of its stability, opportunity, and order. Most treats those same conditions as accelerants for revolt.

The subtext is strategic, not dreamy. “Suited for anarchist agitation” implies a practical organizer’s checklist: dense industrial cities, brutal labor discipline, spectacular inequality, and a political system that advertises freedom while policing dissent. In the Gilded Age, this wasn’t theoretical. The U.S. was a magnet for immigrant workers, a boom economy built on strikebreaking and pinkertons, and a place where radicals could move, print, and recruit across an enormous public sphere. Even repression becomes useful: crackdowns validate the anarchist claim that the state’s civility is a costume.

Context sharpens the edge. Most, a German exile and prominent anarchist propagandist, spent crucial years in the American radical scene of the 1880s and 1890s, when labor conflict routinely turned violent and the Haymarket affair made “anarchist” a national scare word. Calling America “suited” is also a taunt to authorities: your modernity manufactures your enemies. The more industrial, expansive, and rhetorically liberty-soaked the nation becomes, the easier it is to stage the contradiction in public. Most’s intent is recruitment through cynicism: to persuade the disillusioned that the system’s promises are the very levers that can pry it open.