Daily Inspiration Quote by Kathleen Parker

Accountability, here, isn’t a warm civic virtue; it’s an indictment with manners. Kathleen Parker frames power as an obligation, not a prize, and she does it with the sleek moral logic of a columnist who knows the audience is tired of both excuses and sanctimony. The line “duty to perform at a higher level” borrows the language of work and metrics, the corporate register that makes “privilege” sound less like a sociological abstraction and more like a job description. You were handed leverage; now produce results.

The subtext is a rebuke to two familiar evasions. One is elite self-pity: the idea that public scrutiny is unfair, that high office or high status should come with protection from consequences. Parker flips that: scrutiny is part of the compensation package. The other target is populist resignation, the shrugging belief that everyone is corrupt or incompetent, so standards are naive. By insisting on “higher,” she refuses the cynic’s baseline. She’s not asking for perfection; she’s insisting on adult competence.

“If not them, then who?” is the closer that turns a principle into a trapdoor. It’s a rhetorical question that denies the reader the comfort of outsourcing responsibility to “the system” or “regular people.” It also subtly defends institutions: leadership is still necessary, expertise still matters, and the privileged can’t claim both authority and innocence.

Contextually, this lives in the modern churn of scandal cycles, inequality debates, and meritocracy fatigue. Parker’s move is to salvage hierarchy by attaching it to performance, making privilege defensible only if it’s visibly earned every day.