Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Kinsley

History doesn’t flip on moral epiphanies so much as it grinds forward through repeatable TV episodes: the same argument, new cast, slightly upgraded props. That’s the sly force of Kinsley’s phrasing. “Recurring episodes” frames politics as serialized content - familiar beats, predictable reversals, and a long arc that only looks coherent in hindsight. It’s not romantic progress; it’s reruns with consequences.

The sentence is built around a tension he refuses to resolve. On one hand, “the minority view gradually won” reads like a vindication narrative, the kind liberal democracies tell themselves to prove the system is self-correcting. On the other, Kinsley undercuts any sanctimony by insisting each case is a mess: “a profusion of factors,” “naked partisanship on both sides.” That last clause is doing the dirty work. “Naked” isn’t neutral; it suggests motives stripped of principle, parties behaving less like deliberative institutions than like tribal machines.

The intent is both diagnostic and prophylactic. Kinsley is warning readers away from two comforting lies: that political outcomes are pure expressions of reason, and that today’s minority is automatically tomorrow’s enlightened majority. Yet he also smuggles in a thin optimism: despite cynicism about process, “the trend has been clear.” He’s pointing at a pattern - civil rights, social tolerance, maybe market-friendly policy depending on the essay - and arguing that while the fights are grubby, the direction over decades can still be legible. It’s a journalist’s realism: progress, but with fingerprints all over it.