Politics & Power Quote by Peter Krause

Krause is taking a swing at the modern addiction to labels, the way political identity has started to function like a sports jersey you never take off. The repetition of "first and foremost" is the tell: he’s mimicking the mantra-like certainty people use to introduce themselves, then puncturing it with "and that is a mistake". It’s not a polite plea for civility; it’s an accusation that prioritizing a single tribe over a whole person is a kind of self-harm.

The quote works because it keeps widening the frame. He starts with "Republicans" and "Anarchists" - opposing poles that share the same flaw: turning belief into primary identity. Then he slides to "a man or woman", suggesting the problem isn’t only partisan, it’s structural. Any identity, even one as intimate as gender, becomes flattening when it’s treated as the headline rather than a chapter. The subtext is that certainty feels like safety, and community feels like belonging, but both can quietly replace curiosity, complexity, and actual relationship.

"As an actor" matters here. Krause’s craft is literally inhabiting other people, which makes him a natural skeptic of one-note definitions. The cultural context is a decade-plus of algorithmic sorting: social media rewarding the most legible version of you, politics encouraging purity tests, and public life turning identity into a résumé line. When he says it "hurts the individual and it hurts the whole", he’s pointing at the downstream costs: stunted inner life, brittle social bonds, and a public square where people defend categories instead of confronting problems.