Politics & Power Quote by Pete Seeger

Seeger lands the joke with the kind of deadpan mischief that made him dangerous to the right people. Calling himself "more conservative than Goldwater" sounds, for half a beat, like a surrender: the folk saint turning into a cranky reactionary. Then he yanks the rug. Goldwater, avatar of modern conservatism, gets reduced to a single, oddly nerdy obsession: rolling history back to a pre-income-tax Eden. Seeger is not praising that dream; he's exposing it as the true nostalgic engine under a lot of political rhetoric.

The line works because it borrows conservative branding to indict conservative priorities. Seeger flips "conservative" from a moral identity into a procedural question: conservative of what, exactly? Community? Rights? Or just the tax code? By naming the income tax, he points to the material subtext that polite ideology likes to hide. It's a jab at the way anti-government language often functions as camouflage for protecting wealth.

Context matters: Seeger spent decades on the receiving end of government suspicion and blacklisting, so he's not delivering a generic hippie complaint. He's distinguishing between the state as censor and the state as instrument for shared obligation. The income tax becomes shorthand for the New Deal order Goldwater despised and Seeger, in his own egalitarian way, defended: the idea that citizenship includes paying into the common project. The punchline isn't that Seeger is conservative; it's that the loudest "conservatives" are often just romantics for a society with fewer bills for the powerful.