Politics & Power Quote by Norman Mailer

Trust, in Mailer’s America, isn’t earned by being correct or even respectable; it’s earned by proving you’re willing to offend the respectable. “Irreverent” here isn’t just a personality quirk, it’s a credential - a signal that you’re not captured by the pieties of institutions, parties, churches, schools, or polite culture. Mailer is pointing to a peculiarly American suspicion: deference reads as salesmanship. The person who speaks too reverently sounds like someone auditioning for membership, angling for approval, managing a brand.

The line is also a backhanded self-portrait. Mailer built a public persona on swagger, provocation, and combativeness, and he’s admitting the market rewards it. In a country that mythologizes the outsider and distrusts the expert, irreverence becomes a kind of authenticity hack: you puncture balloons so the crowd knows you’re not inflating your own. It’s the same logic that makes bluntness feel “real” even when it’s performative, even when it masks ego.

Context matters. Mailer came up in the postwar era and matured through the 1960s, when authority (government, the military, the patriarchal household, the media) was both expansive and increasingly discredited. After Vietnam and Watergate, skepticism hardened into reflex. Mailer’s sentence catches that turn: Americans don’t merely enjoy irreverence; they use it as a lie detector. The irony is that once irreverence becomes the ticket to trust, it risks becoming its own orthodoxy - a new reverence for the posture of disrespect.