Politics & Power Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell’s jab lands because it skewers a peculiarly American kind of egalitarianism: equality as self-flattery rather than self-discipline. The sentence sets up a neat asymmetry. Americans, he suggests, love the democratic thrill of believing no one is “above” them, but quietly preserve the comforts of believing plenty of people are “below.” It’s not a claim about constitutional law; it’s about social reflexes. The punchline - “applies only upwards, not downwards” - is Russell at his most surgical, turning a civic creed into a one-way moral escalator.

The intent is less to deny the sincerity of American ideals than to expose their selective application. “From the time of Jefferson onward” signals the founding contradiction: Jefferson’s language of universal equality coexisting with a society built on slavery, dispossession, and inherited hierarchy. Russell is pointing to how a nation can keep the poetry of its principles while narrowing the radius of who counts. Equality becomes a rhetoric for resisting deference, not a practice that restrains domination.

Subtext: democracy can serve status anxiety as much as justice. If no one is your superior, you never have to bow; if you still get to have inferiors, you never have to share too much. That double move helps explain why a culture can be allergic to “elites” while remaining intensely stratified, and why appeals to “freedom” so often mask the freedom to rank, exclude, and sneer.

Contextually, Russell is writing as a British intellectual watching American modernity with both admiration and skepticism. His line isn’t anti-American so much as anti-self-congratulation: a warning that equality, when treated as a personal entitlement rather than a social obligation, curdles into hypocrisy.