Politics & Power Quote by Murray Kempton

Kempton’s line lands like a pin in the balloon of civic idealism: government, he suggests, doesn’t merely enforce policy; it manufactures the moral story that makes policy feel inevitable. The punch is in “invent philosophies” - not “articulate principles” or “defend values,” but fabricate a coherent worldview after the fact. Philosophy, in this formulation, isn’t wisdom. It’s packaging.

The phrase “its own convenience” is the tell. Kempton isn’t accusing officials of occasional hypocrisy; he’s describing a structural habit. Institutions have deadlines, budgets, constituencies, and crises. Convenience is the unromantic gravity pulling every lofty declaration down to earth. When reality demands surveillance, austerity, war, or bureaucratic expansion, the state’s rhetorical apparatus rushes in to launder necessity into virtue: security becomes freedom’s price, cuts become responsibility, coercion becomes order.

As a journalist with a Cold War-era skepticism for American power and its self-mythologizing, Kempton is diagnosing how democracies rationalize themselves without admitting they’re improvising. “Function” makes the cynicism colder: this isn’t a bug, it’s a job description. The quote also needles the public’s complicity. Philosophies only “explain” demands if someone is hungry for explanation - if voters prefer narratives of destiny and principle over the awkward truth that governance is often triage. Kempton’s real target may be less the state than the stories we let it tell in our name.