Politics & Power Quote by John T. Flynn

Flynn opens by borrowing the crowd's certainty, then yanking it away. The first sentence is a ventriloquism act: he speaks in the voice of consensus ("Most people in this country believe...") to establish how dominant the Cold War storyline had become. Then comes the trapdoor: "This is a serious mistake". Not "exaggeration" or "overreaction" but mistake, a word that implies a strategic blunder with consequences, not just bad vibes. He's not defending communists; he's indicting the nation's sense of priority.

The subtext is about misdirection. Calling the Communist Party "the chief internal enemy" conveniently simplifies a messy reality into a villain you can subpoena. By adding "and its dupes", Flynn signals how elastic the accusation is: the enemy is not only a small party but anyone who can be framed as foolish, naive, or insufficiently patriotic. That elasticity is the point. It turns political policing into a mass instrument, useful for disciplining unions, intimidating dissent, and protecting entrenched power under the banner of protecting "our economic system."

Context matters: Flynn was a fierce critic of Roosevelt's New Deal and later of wartime and postwar expansions of state power. Writing in the era when HUAC and loyalty programs were redefining American civic life, he suggests the real threat isn't a few leftists meeting in back rooms; it's the willingness to let fear rewire democratic norms. The line works because it refuses the comforting drama of infiltration and instead points to a more unsettling possibility: the system can be hollowed out by those claiming to save it.