Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Welch

There is a contemptuous little trick embedded in Welch's line: he makes "ringing editorials" sound like brass instruments blaring over an empty parade route. The jab isn't just at newspapers, but at a whole civic reflex - the way institutions narrate reality into being, especially when reality is wobbling. "Declaring" is doing heavy lifting here. It implies performance, not investigation; a verdict delivered with confidence rather than a conclusion earned with evidence.

The phrase "this is and always was" is the tell. It's the language of retroactive certainty, the kind that shows up when a society needs its self-image to be stable even as its behavior becomes less defensible. Welch suggests that democracy, in the American context, is less a practiced discipline than a brand promise - something reaffirmed when challenged, precisely because it can't be taken for granted. The editorial becomes a ritual of reassurance: if the paper says it loudly enough, the contradiction between ideals and power can be papered over.

Context matters because Welch wasn't a neutral media critic; he was the founder of the John Birch Society, a Cold War-era conspiracist whose politics treated mainstream institutions as soft totalitarian collaborators. That makes the sentence double-edged. It's a perceptive critique of how media can launder legitimacy for the status quo, but it's also a gateway drug to blanket distrust: if newspapers "declare" democracy, then any consensus can be framed as propaganda. The wit lands because it weaponizes a real vulnerability - democratic identity is maintained partly through narration - and turns it into an accusation of fraud.