Politics & Power Quote by Todd Gitlin

Gitlin’s line is a preemptive strike against the most predictable trap in American political argument: the demand that hope be justified as sainthood. By invoking Jesus and Muhammad, he doesn’t flirt with sacrilege so much as he stages an exaggeration to expose another exaggeration-the way critics caricature any enthusiasm for a candidate as messianic delusion. The joke is barbed: our culture oscillates between celebrity worship and instant disillusionment, and both postures conveniently excuse disengagement.

The real pivot is the last clause. “Restarting politics” frames electoral support not as romance with John Kerry’s personality, but as a systems-level craving for normal democratic circulation: argument, accountability, reversibility. It’s a technocratic word (“restarting”) used as moral language, implying politics has crashed-like software frozen by cynicism, money, and permanent war logic. Gitlin, a sociologist steeped in movements and media, is signaling that the stakes aren’t Kerry’s charisma; it’s whether citizens can imagine politics as something other than spectacle and polarization.

Context matters: written in the shadow of the Bush years and the post-9/11 security state, when dissent was easily painted as disloyal, Kerry became a vessel for a thinner, more procedural kind of hope. Gitlin isn’t selling salvation. He’s defending the modest but radical idea that democracy can be rebooted at all-and that insisting on perfection is just another way to keep the system stuck.