Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

The sharpest barb here is the phrase "so-called conservative administration" - a label revoked in real time. Bovard isn’t merely disappointed with conservatives; he’s indicting the brand. The sentence frames “conservative” as a marketing identity that’s supposed to come with reflexive suspicion of state power, then points out how quickly that suspicion evaporates when the people wielding power wear the right jersey.

His intent is less to persuade the left than to shame the right. “Surprising to me” reads polite, but it’s a rhetorical cudgel: you were supposed to know better. The subtext is that ideological movements don’t get captured by their enemies; they get hollowed out by their allies, through silence. By focusing on “precedence” (he means precedent, but the slip almost helps), Bovard shifts attention from the day’s controversy to the longer arc of permission. Every unchallenged act of censorship becomes a reusable tool, ready for whoever wins next. That’s the civil-libertarian nightmare: today’s “necessary” suppression becomes tomorrow’s routine governance.

The context is a familiar post-9/11 and post-culture-war pattern: administrations that campaign on limiting government discover a taste for surveillance, policing, and information control once they’re in charge. Bovard’s cynicism lands because it names the quiet bargain many partisans accept: freedom as a principle, but only when it’s politically convenient. The real target isn’t one policy; it’s the movement’s selective memory about what “conservative” was supposed to conserve.