Politics & Power Quote by Robert Welch

Nostalgia is doing heavy lifting here, dressed up as a civic compliment. Welch paints an Edenic “best days” where class difference supposedly existed without friction: rich and poor “met on such equal terms” and, crucially, did so “without the slightest trace of hostility.” That last clause isn’t description so much as a rebuke. It implies that any present-day anger about inequality is a moral failing, an emotional excess, not a response to changed conditions. The rhetorical trick is to define social harmony as the absence of complaint rather than the presence of justice.

The line also smuggles in an ideal of equality that’s mostly social and behavioral, not structural. “Met” suggests shared spaces and manners: the diner, the church, the voting booth, the small-town sidewalk. It avoids wages, power, segregation, gendered labor, and the policy scaffolding that actually determines how “equal terms” get made. Welch’s republic is a place where the poor are dignified so long as they are not adversarial; the rich are acceptable so long as they’re not resented. That’s not classlessness, it’s deference repackaged as virtue.

Context matters because Welch, as the founder of the John Birch Society, wrote from a Cold War conservative worldview that treated class conflict as a gateway drug to collectivism. The quote works as prophylaxis: romanticize an earlier consensus, pathologize “hostility,” and you’ve preemptively delegitimized labor militancy, civil rights agitation, and redistributive politics as corrosive deviations from the American temperament.