Politics & Power Quote by Eric Hoffer

Hoffer’s line is engineered to sting: it borrows the familiar immigrant-gratitude story and turns it into an accusation aimed at the comfortable. The phrase “almost seems” is doing quiet work, posing as modest observation while smuggling in a sweeping indictment. Then comes the kicker, “native Americans” - a deliberately jarring term that collapses “people born here” into the language of indigeneity, as if to suggest entitlement has become a kind of inherited status. That semantic slippage is part of the provocation.

The subtext is less patriotism-as-feeling than patriotism-as-discipline. Hoffer implies that attachment to the nation isn’t natural; it has to be renewed, and hardship is his preferred engine for renewal. New immigrants, in this view, arrive with a comparative lens: they know what they fled, so America registers as choice rather than backdrop. Natives, by contrast, are cast as consumers of a country they didn’t earn, free to critique because the costs of stability are invisible to them.

Context matters: Hoffer wrote in the long afterglow of World War II and the early Cold War, when “America” was sold as an idea in competition with communism, and dissent could be read as decadence or disloyalty. His framing anticipates a recurring American argument: that critique is suspect unless it comes with conspicuous gratitude.

What makes the line effective is its bait-and-switch. It sounds like an ode to immigrants, but it’s really a warning to citizens: if you stop loving the country, the country will import someone who will. That’s not just cultural commentary; it’s a political instrument.