Success Quote by Dennis Prager

Prager’s line is engineered like a courtroom summary: two clean camps, one tidy moral. Liberals, he suggests, externalize responsibility; conservatives internalize it. The phrasing does a lot of ideological lifting. “Onus” signals burden and blame, not just causality. Success becomes a kind of ethical test, and whoever assigns the burden gets cast as either enabling or demanding.

The intent is less to describe liberalism accurately than to frame it as a worldview of excuses. By making “society” the liberal culprit, he taps a familiar conservative critique: that structural analysis is a way to dodge personal accountability. The conservative side of the equation is rhetorically flattering: “you and your family” doesn’t just mean individual effort; it evokes loyalty, discipline, and inherited virtue. Family is the key amplifier here. It smuggles tradition into the definition of responsibility, implying that stable households are not merely helpful but morally central.

The subtext is a political argument about policy without naming policy. If success is socially produced, you can justify redistribution, regulation, anti-discrimination enforcement, and public investment. If success is primarily personal and familial, then government aid starts to look like indulgence, and inequality becomes evidence of different choices rather than different conditions.

Contextually, this is classic late-20th-century talk-radio and op-ed combat: compress complex debates about race, class mobility, education, and labor markets into a binary that feels intuitive. Its power lies in that simplicity; its cost is that it turns a both-and reality into a loyalty test.