Politics & Power Quote by David Lloyd

There’s a strategic plainness to this confession: no manifesto, no footnotes, just an identity statement delivered like a personal baseline. Coming from an artist, “I’ve always been” does more than claim consistency - it dares you to stop treating politics as a phase or a marketing pivot. It reads like pre-emptive damage control in a culture that expects creators to be either safely “progressive” in vibes or loudly ideological in a way that can be filed away and dismissed. Lloyd’s phrasing refuses both traps.

The pairing is the real tell. “Liberal” signals broad civil-liberties instincts and a comfort with pluralism; “strong socialist leanings” tightens the frame toward economics, labor, class power - the part of left politics that makes institutions nervous. He isn’t choosing one label; he’s acknowledging the messy coalition many people live in: culturally liberal, structurally skeptical of capitalism. The word “leanings” is doing quiet rhetorical work, too. It softens the edge of “socialist” without retreating from it, suggesting conviction without sectarian branding.

Context matters: for decades, “socialist” has been used as a smear in Anglophone media, while artists are routinely told to keep politics out of the art even as they’re asked to decorate politics with coolness. Lloyd’s line pushes back: art isn’t a neutral zone, and his worldview isn’t a reveal. It’s the operating system.