Politics & Power Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

The line lands like a backhanded compliment to the New Deal generation: if you came of age in the thirties and didn’t get radicalized or broken by it, you probably weren’t paying attention. Johnson is doing two things at once. He’s flattering struggle as a credential and weaponizing it as a moral sorting mechanism. “Communist” and “dropout” aren’t offered as policy positions so much as as proof of contact with reality. In his framing, the Depression was such a brutal education that only the ideologically converted or the personally derailed could claim to have truly lived it. Everyone else? Comfortably numb, untested, suspicious.

The subtext is classic LBJ: a crude, performative yardstick for seriousness. Johnson loved to talk in absolutes because absolutes force people to choose sides, and he governed by forcing choices. He’s also laundering his own origin story. The Texas Hill Country kid who saw poverty up close built his legitimacy on being the guy who understood deprivation not as an abstraction but as a smell in the room. By praising even Communists, he’s not endorsing Marxism; he’s conceding that the system failed loudly enough to make radicalism rational.

Context matters. The thirties produced both the welfare-state consensus Johnson would later expand with the Great Society and the red-scare paranoia that would later police it. That tension is the point: he’s arguing that history’s pressure should leave a mark. If it didn’t, you’re not fit for power.