Politics & Power Quote by Molly Ivins

In Molly Ivins's hands, patriotism becomes a contact sport. Her line praises the Constitution, then immediately refuses to treat it like a finished monument. The key word is "possible": she isn't claiming history has been a steady march of progress, just that there's a morally serious way to read it - and that the best reading indicts the gaps between founding promises and lived reality.

The sentence is doing quiet political jujitsu. By rooting the struggle in "the liberties established in our Constitution", Ivins disarms the reflexive accusation that demands for equality are un-American. She frames expansion of rights not as a radical rewrite but as completion work, a renovation based on the original blueprints. It's a journalist's move: set the terms so the opposition has to argue against the Constitution itself, or admit the project is unfinished.

Subtext: the American story isn't heroic consensus; it's conflict, pressure, litigation, protest, and grudging concessions. "One long struggle" flattens romantic nostalgia and replaces it with a rougher national self-portrait where the real engine of change is people who were excluded deciding they won't stay excluded - Black Americans confronting slavery and Jim Crow, women pushing for suffrage and bodily autonomy, workers demanding protections, LGBTQ Americans insisting on recognition.

Context matters: Ivins wrote from a Texas-grounded, anti-bullshit tradition that distrusted lofty rhetoric used to excuse inequality. Her formulation is optimistic, but not naive. It grants the country a durable ideal while reminding readers that the ideal only becomes real when someone fights to make "everyone" mean everyone.