Daily Inspiration Quote by E. P. Thompson

Thompson is doing something more unsettling than praising American openness: he’s diagnosing it as a style of governance that can double as a sedative. The first half of the sentence reads like diplomatic courtesy, almost a necessary visa stamp for criticism. He admires the U.S. for its openness, calls it “important to the world,” and grants the country the moral prestige it likes to export. Then comes the knife: “But the information and the discussion sometimes come too late.” Openness, in this framing, is real but mistimed.

The subtext is about procedural theater. You can have a roaring marketplace of ideas, endless hearings, investigative journalism, leaks, and punditry, and still run a system where the “effective decision” is already locked in by executive power, institutional inertia, or geopolitical commitments. Discussion becomes post-hoc: not a way to decide, but a way to metabolize decisions already made. That’s not censorship; it’s choreography.

Context matters. Thompson, a Marxist-inflected British historian shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, and the rise of the national security state, watched liberal democracies perfect a trick: keep the forms of debate while tightening the timeline of real choice. The line “sometimes” is doing strategic work too, avoiding a blanket indictment while implying a pattern.

What makes the quote land is its refusal to sneer. Thompson concedes the genuine value of openness even as he warns that timing is power. Transparency after the fact can be just another way of saying: you were always free to talk, just not free to stop it.