Politics & Power Quote by Russell Baker

Tradition, Baker implies, isn’t a sturdy heirloom in the American closet so much as a disposable prop. The line lands because it flips a familiar national self-myth: we like to imagine ourselves as a culture that reveres its founding rituals while also reinventing itself. Baker’s jab is that reinvention usually wins, and it doesn’t even require a fight. “Nothing dies easier” isn’t just cynicism; it’s a diagnosis of a society built to prize novelty, mobility, and convenience over continuity.

The intent is classic Baker: a journalist’s wry moral inventory, delivered in a sentence that sounds almost casual until you feel the blade. “Tradition” here isn’t only folkways and holidays. It’s institutional habits, civic manners, and the slow, boring discipline of doing something the same way because it connects you to people you’ll never meet. America’s genius for disruption, he suggests, doubles as a talent for forgetting - especially when memory costs time, money, or restraint.

The subtext is that we don’t so much overthrow tradition as allow it to evaporate. Consumer culture helps: every season arrives with a new “classic,” pre-packaged nostalgia that can be purchased, photographed, and replaced. Politics helps too: appeals to “traditional values” often function as branding, not stewardship, invoked loudly and dropped quietly when inconvenient.

Context matters: Baker wrote in an era when mass media, postwar affluence, and accelerating social change were remaking daily life. His line isn’t mourning an imagined golden age; it’s warning that a nation addicted to the next thing may wake up unmoored, surprised by how little it chose to carry forward.