Politics & Power Quote by Patrick J. Kennedy

That little stumble in the middle of a familiar civic mantra is the point: Kennedy is treating the Pledge of Allegiance less like a rote recital and more like a daily contract we keep signing without rereading the terms. By stressing "in our pledge every day", he pulls the line out of the schoolroom and into adult life, where patriotism is supposed to show up not as nostalgia but as behavior. It reframes the Pledge from a childhood ritual into an ongoing test of whether the country is living up to its own advertising.

The subtext is pointedly contemporary. "Under God" is not a neutral phrase; it was added in 1954, in the cold-war era, as a spiritual contrast to "godless" communism. Invoking it now carries the friction of modern pluralism: whose God, whose nation, whose belonging? Kennedy, a politician from America’s most famous Catholic dynasty and a public figure shaped by debates over faith in public life, uses the line to signal unity while quietly acknowledging that unity is contested.

Then comes the real needle: "with liberty and justice for all". It’s the part everyone rushes past, and it’s the part that makes the Pledge risky to repeat. Kennedy’s emphasis reads as a moral audit, especially against the backdrop of inequality, civil rights battles, and today’s culture-war skirmishes over who gets full citizenship. The rhetorical move is simple but effective: take the most sanitized sentence in American life and make it accusatory again.