Politics & Power Quote by John Updike

Updike’s patriotism comes in the form of a backhanded compliment: the best government is the one that keeps its hands off your sleeve. It’s a line that flatters the state and disciplines it at the same time, and the slyness matters. By saying he loves his government "not least" for leaving him alone, he turns affection into a performance of restraint. His ideal civic relationship isn’t romance; it’s good boundaries.

The intent is quietly polemical. Updike is defending a liberal, small-l tradition of privacy and autonomy, the kind that assumes the individual’s life is mostly none of the public’s business. That’s not anarchism; it’s an argument for a competent, limited state that can be trusted precisely because it doesn’t constantly prove it exists. The subtext is suspicion: power is always tempted to meddle, moralize, surveil, or "help" in ways that feel like ownership. Gratitude becomes a warning label.

Placed against Updike’s America - postwar prosperity shading into culture-war anxiety and expanding bureaucracy - the sentence reads like a novelist’s version of political theory. He’s not outlining policy; he’s describing a temperament: the middle-class citizen who wants the lights on, the roads paved, the mail delivered, and then, crucially, the door closed. The line works because it captures a distinctly American paradox: faith in institutions expressed as a desire to be spared their attention.