Politics & Power Quote by Larry Hagman

Hagman’s line has the loose, half-improvised rhythm of someone thinking out loud, which is exactly why it lands: it captures a cultural argument in mid-sentence, not pre-packaged for applause. He’s not delivering doctrine; he’s sketching a mood. The opening hedges ("I guess", "I think") signal an actor’s instinct for audience temperature, a refusal to sound like a scold while still staking out a position. That caution reads like a generational tell: someone who’s watched American values get litigated on television, in courts, and at dinner tables, and knows certainty can sound like arrogance.

The intent is to describe moral change without sanctifying it. Hagman frames morality as a moving target ("more liberal and more diverse") but then throws in a curveball: "even... much more fundamental". That word choice is doing double duty. On one level, he means "fundamental" as in basic, elemental principles shifting under modern life. On another, he’s literally pivoting to fundamentalism, calling out the religious right as a counter-revolution. The subtext: liberalization isn’t a straight-line march; it’s a tug-of-war that can produce both openness and backlash.

The "go back about 50 years" jab compresses a whole critique of nostalgia politics: the idea that some movements treat the past as a moral reset button. Coming from Hagman - forever associated with primetime power games and American excess - it reads as both observational and lightly sardonic: the country changes, and so do the people who insist it shouldn’t.