Politics & Power Quote by Robert Welch

Welch’s line is less an economic diagnosis than a political weapon: a bid to make liberal governance sound not merely misguided, but foreign, covert, and existentially dangerous. The giveaway is “of course,” a slick little aside that performs inevitability. It signals to the initiated reader that the conclusion is already settled; debate is for suckers and dupes. By the time “Marxist program” arrives, the sentence has pre-emptively framed dissent as naivete.

The specific intent is to retroactively brand a mainstream American policy tool - the progressive income tax - as ideological contraband smuggled in during Wilson’s administration. It’s guilt by association with a capital-I Enemy, a Cold War move that turns a technocratic question (how to fund the state, how to distribute tax burden) into a loyalty test. Wilson becomes less a president than a hinge in a conspiracy narrative: the moment “huge parts” of something sinister slipped into “the American system,” phrased like malware entering a computer.

Subtext does the heavy lifting. Calling it “the Marxist program” collapses a sprawling set of socialist theories and revolutionary aims into a single checklist item, then pretends the checklist is being quietly completed. The claim also sanitizes the very American lineage of progressive taxation - a reform pushed through constitutional amendment, debated publicly, and justified in pragmatic terms of revenue and fairness. Welch isn’t trying to win the policy argument; he’s trying to delegitimize the arena where policy arguments happen, by insisting the referee is already wearing the other team’s jersey.