Politics & Power Quote by Mary McCarthy

McCarthy’s line is a neat little scalpel: it exposes how political culture launders cowardice through the language of “strategy” while treating conscience as a kind of betrayal. The jab isn’t at retreat itself; it’s at the selective honor system that governs public life. If you back down because the generals say the terrain is unfavorable, you’re prudent. If you back down because the cause is dirty, the costs are obscene, or the means are indefensible, you’re weak, naive, even unpatriotic. The same act gets opposite moral pricing depending on whether it can be framed as force management rather than moral reckoning.

Her intent is diagnostic and accusatory. McCarthy is pointing at a political machine that prefers technical justifications because they preserve the aura of competence and control. “Military considerations” sound objective, data-driven, devoid of messy feeling. “Ethical reasons” are inconvenient precisely because they invite accountability: they imply someone chose wrong in the first place. Ethics doesn’t just ask “Can we win?”; it asks “Should we be here at all?” That question destabilizes careers, coalitions, and national myths.

The subtext is also about gendered and social codes: ethics reads as softness, war logic as seriousness. Writing in a century defined by hot and cold wars, McCarthy is skewering the way states protect their self-image. A tactical retreat keeps the story intact. A moral retreat admits the story was rotten.