Politics & Power Quote by Elmer Davis

Davis is skewering a peculiarly American inflation of credibility: the way accomplishment in one arena gets cashed in like a blank check everywhere else. The line lands because it frames “what is wrong with America” not as some grand moral failing, but as a social habit so ordinary it hides in plain sight - our eagerness to treat fame as competence and confidence as expertise.

The bite is in the phrasing. “Done anything at all” is a deliberate downshift, puncturing hero worship by implying that even modest achievement triggers the authority halo. “Expected to be an authority” shifts blame from the pundit-class striver to the audience and institutions that demand omniscience: editors booking “names,” civic groups inviting “successful men” to opine, listeners rewarding the cleanest takes. Davis is diagnosing a market for certainty, not merely a surplus of egos.

As a mid-century journalist, he’s writing from a world where mass media was consolidating national attention - radio voices, syndicated columns, celebrity lecture circuits. In that ecosystem, the multi-topic sage becomes a product: portable, quotable, reliable on deadline. The subtext is a warning about democratic vulnerability. When prestige outruns knowledge, public debate becomes less about evidence than about permission slips: Who gets to speak, and why? Davis isn’t arguing against polymaths; he’s arguing against a culture that confuses prominence with precision, and then wonders why it keeps getting blindsided.