Politics & Power Quote by Rube Goldberg

There is something delightfully Rube Goldberg about the bluntness here: a simple declaration that, on closer inspection, contains its own complicated machinery. "Naturally" is the tell. It frames politics not as a considered stance but as an instinctive setting, like gravity or habit. Coming from a cartoonist famous for absurd contraptions, the word lands with a wink: human beings love to present their beliefs as clean, inevitable, common-sense truths, even when those beliefs are assembled from a tangle of upbringing, class signals, and social belonging.

The repetition - "I'm conservative; I'm a Republican" - does more than clarify party and ideology. It fuses them, implying a time when the label "Republican" could be worn as an identity badge rather than a portfolio of policy positions. Then the kicker: "I always was". It's less argument than ancestry. The line quietly suggests that political affiliation can function like a family recipe, inherited and defended precisely because it predates any need to justify it.

Context matters: Goldberg lived through the Progressive Era, the New Deal, two World Wars, and the early Cold War - decades when American politics reorganized and the meaning of "conservative" shifted under people's feet. Saying "I always was" reads as a refusal to renegotiate the self amid that churn. The subtext isn't just loyalty; it's a desire for continuity in a century that kept redesigning the schematic.