Politics & Power Quote by James Ellroy

Ellroy isn’t confessing a politics so much as brandishing a persona: the novelist as vice cop, staking out the moral perimeter with a flashlight and a sneer. The first line, “conservative by temperament,” is a careful dodge. Temperament reads as instinct, not ideology; it implies that his taste for order is visceral, almost physiological, and therefore beyond debate. Then he immediately collapses the distance between “conservative” and “anti-crime,” as if disapproving of criminal activity were a distinctive political position rather than a baseline. That move is the tell. He’s not trying to persuade; he’s trying to frame.

The cadence is deliberately blunt and prosecutorial: short clauses, declarative certainty, no qualifiers. “Very solidly and markedly” is overemphasis as performance, like a witness pounding the table to establish credibility. Ellroy, whose work luxuriates in institutional rot, corruption, and brutality, understands the seduction of authority precisely because he’s mapped its pathologies. The subtext is less “cops are good” than “the chaos is worse.” He’s asking readers to accept the bargain: yes, the machinery grinds people up, but at least it’s a machine.

Context matters: Ellroy’s noir universe is all appetites, violence, and compromised men; the state is both predator and only available containment. When he says he’d “rather err on the side of too much authority,” he’s staking allegiance to a flawed bulwark, not a clean ideal. It’s the political logic of hardboiled fiction made explicit: safety is purchased with coercion, and the invoice always comes due.