Politics & Power Quote by Jim Garrison

Garrison’s line lands because it refuses the cartoon version of fascism as jackboots and swastikas and points instead to its most marketable American packaging: protection. “I’m afraid” isn’t rhetorical modesty; it’s a claim of lived, insider knowledge. As a public servant, he’s signaling that he’s seen how institutions justify extraordinary powers with ordinary language. Fear is the product, “national security” the brand label that makes it sell.

The subtext is an accusation about how democracies hollow out. You don’t need a coup if you can normalize secrecy, expand surveillance, and treat dissent as risk management. “Will come to America” sounds prophetic, but the mechanism is bureaucratic, not mystical: agencies accumulate latitude, courts defer, legislators trade oversight for plausible deniability, and the public is asked to accept less transparency as the price of safety. Fascism, in this framing, isn’t a foreign ideology invading the homeland; it’s a domestic administrative style that grows in the shadows of emergency.

Context sharpens the edge. Garrison is inseparable from his crusading, controversial role as New Orleans DA and his belief that the national security state could hide criminality behind classification and patriotic ritual. In Cold War America and the post-assassination years, “security” wasn’t just policy; it was a permission slip. The quote works because it anticipates a recurring national pattern: crises become accelerants, and “security” becomes the one argument that’s allowed to end the argument.