Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Keys Moran

It reads like a political compass drawn with a novelist's eyebrow raised: protect the kids, get out of grown-ups' way, and then - almost as a punchline - flirt with Congress. Moran is signaling a moral hierarchy that many people feel but rarely articulate cleanly. Children, in this frame, are the one group society is allowed to be unapologetically paternalistic toward: compulsory schooling, safety rules, public spending, interventions that would sound tyrannical if aimed at consenting adults. Calling that stance "liberal" doesn't just mean generous; it invokes the postwar idea of the state as a guardian when power imbalances are baked in.

Then the sentence swivels into "libertarian where adults are concerned", a deliberately bracing contrast that smuggles in a critique of modern American governance: we regulate, shame, and legislate adult behavior like it's a public health emergency, then act surprised when politics turns bitter. The subtext is less "freedom for freedom's sake" than "stop using policy as a substitute for trust."

The final clause - "for whatever that's worth" - is the tell. It's self-deprecation as inoculation, but also an indictment of electoral politics as theater: even a carefully limited philosophy gets flattened into party branding, fundraising, and the algorithmic outrage cycle. Coming from a science fiction writer, it doubles as worldbuilding: a miniature constitution for a saner society, paired with the grim awareness that the current one might not reward nuance. The intent isn't to announce a platform so much as to expose the mismatch between adult complexity and the adolescent incentives of Congress.