Politics & Power Quote by Russell Banks

It lands like a weary diagnosis: not a new crisis, but an old one that never got treated. When Russell Banks points to 1968, he’s invoking a shorthand for America at its most combustibly self-revealing: Vietnam, assassinations, urban uprisings, campus revolt, the messy collision of civil rights with white backlash. The power of the line is its refusal to grant the present the flattering idea of novelty. If these are the same fights, then our outrage is less a sign of moral awakening than a sign of historical amnesia.

Banks’ intent is partly corrective. Writers like him distrust the national habit of rebranding structural conflict as a “new polarization” story. By yoking today’s divisions to 1968, he implies continuity in the underlying machinery: racial hierarchy, class resentment, state violence, culture-war symbolism that stands in for material power. “Cultural and political” is doing sly work here; it suggests that the disputes we label as taste, values, or identity are inseparable from policy, policing, and who gets protected by institutions.

The subtext is grimly pragmatic: if the same issues persist, then our supposed progress has been partial, fragile, or strategically reversed. It also hints at a narrative failure. America loves redemption arcs; Banks offers the less marketable plot of recurrence, where conflict is not resolved but managed, postponed, and periodically reignited.

Context matters because 1968 is mythologized as exception. Banks uses it as template. The line dares the reader to ask a harder question than “Why are we so divided?”: What did we choose not to change when we had the chance?