Politics & Power Quote by Anne Sullivan

Even when she calls Communist ideas “mistaken,” Sullivan refuses the lazy comfort of dismissal. She’s arguing for a kind of intellectual composting: bad doctrines can still fertilize new thinking. The line is built to provoke both camps. To anti-Communists, it offers a grudging concession that experimentation has value. To sympathizers, it slips in a firm verdict on the ideology while rescuing its cultural aftereffects from wholesale condemnation.

The intent reads practical, educatorly, and a little insurgent. Sullivan isn’t grading Communism on moral purity; she’s evaluating it as a stress test on society’s assumptions. “Trying them out” is the key phrase. It treats ideology as curriculum: you learn not only from correct answers but from the full-contact consequences of wrong ones. There’s an implied critique of armchair certainty - the people who “know” an idea is dangerous without ever engaging the questions that made it appealing.

Subtextually, the quote defends imaginative risk. Communism, in the early 20th century, wasn’t just a policy proposal; it was a rival story about work, dignity, and power. Even when that story collapses under its own contradictions or turns coercive in practice, it forces capitalism, liberalism, and nationalism to articulate better arguments, design sturdier institutions, and confront hypocrisies they’d prefer to ignore. Sullivan’s wager is that thought advances by collision. She frames that collision not as a heroic revolution, but as pedagogy at scale: society learning, painfully, what it wants to become by testing what it can’t afford to be.