Politics & Power Quote by Cory Doctorow

Doctorow’s “pretty mixed” is doing diplomatic heavy lifting. In a culture that rewards hot takes and totalizing judgments, he opts for calibrated ambivalence - not because he’s unsure, but because he’s signaling a boundary. The line reads like an early warning label: don’t mistake admiration for endorsement, and don’t assume political alignment is a prerequisite for artistic or professional respect.

The name “Scott Card” carries the context. Orson Scott Card is both a celebrated science-fiction author and a polarizing political figure, especially around LGBTQ rights. Doctorow, a long-time advocate for digital rights and broadly progressive causes, knows the audience pressure here: people want him to either denounce Card cleanly or defend him as “separate the art from the artist.” He chooses neither. That’s the subtext: refusing the binary.

The repeated “pretty” is telling. It softens the edge while still drawing a clear map of distance (“pretty far apart”). It’s a rhetorical tactic common to writers who’ve spent time online: speak in understatement to avoid feeding the outrage machine, while still making your values legible. Doctorow’s intent isn’t to center Card so much as to narrate his own ethical posture - the idea that you can acknowledge someone’s influence or craft and still be explicit about political disagreement.

It’s also a quiet comment on intellectual ecosystems: communities survive on coalitions, and coalitions survive on people who can say, plainly, “we’re not the same,” without turning that into a purity test.