Life & Wisdom Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s sentence is a trapdoor: it invites the reader to look where the Right thinks it’s aiming, then flips the floor to reveal a different target. The key phrase is “this power structure” - maddeningly nonspecific, almost taunting. He’s not arguing about ideology in the abstract; he’s redirecting attention from “Communists” (a catch-all boogeyman in mid-century America) to an entrenched institutional network he believes actually governs outcomes. The rhetorical move is surgical: make the Right’s crusade sound not only misguided but manipulated, as if the culture war is a decoy operation.

The intent is twofold. First, to puncture Cold War political theater by suggesting that anti-communism functions as a misdiagnosis, maybe even a convenient story told to mobilize anger. Second, to position “power” as structural and continuous rather than partisan and episodic. “Attacking for years” implies a long, repetitive campaign; “in the belief” implies sincerity, but also naivete. Quigley isn’t granting the Radical Right strategic clarity - he’s diagnosing them as shadowboxing.

Context matters: Quigley wrote in an era when “Communist” was less a precise label than a social solvent, used to dissolve credibility, unions, civil rights activism, internationalism. His broader work is associated with elite-network analysis and the idea that financial and policy institutions can outlast electoral swings. Read that way, the subtext isn’t “the Right is wrong about communism,” but “the Right’s rage is being spent against the wrong machinery.” It’s a bleakly modern insight: political movements can be loud, sincere, and still function as useful idiots for the systems they claim to overthrow.