Politics & Power Quote by Cal Thomas

Blame the politicians if you want, Cal Thomas implies, but check the mirror first. The line is built to puncture a comforting modern fantasy: that dysfunction is something done to us by distant elites, fixable by swapping out leaders like a bad battery. By insisting that government "reflects the soul" of the people, Thomas shifts the argument from policy to character, from institutions to habits. It is moral framing disguised as civic diagnosis.

The subtext is conservative in the old-school, culture-first sense. "Change at the top" becomes a kind of placebo if the public appetite stays the same: for easy money, easy outrage, easy entertainment, easy absolution. The phrase "live in different ways" is doing heavy work, quietly relocating responsibility from Washington to living rooms, churches, schools, and screens. It also smuggles in a hierarchy of values: decadence is the master variable; politics is downstream.

The sharpest move is the inversion at the end. Social problems are not causes but symptoms, "a reflection" of decadence. That rhetorical reversal is meant to disarm technocratic fixes - programs, reforms, new agencies - by casting them as mopping up water while the sink still runs. Context matters: Thomas, a long-running syndicated columnist in America’s post-1960s culture-war ecosystem, is arguing against the idea that the state can engineer virtue. Whether you buy the diagnosis or not, the quote works because it refuses the seductive comfort of external villains and makes civic life feel like a personal audit.