Politics & Power Quote by Kin Hubbard

Hubbard’s jab lands because it treats “conservative” not as an ideology but as a social alibi. The line is built like a small-town epigram: plain words, hard edge. “Get credit” is the tell. He’s not accusing people of holding bad beliefs; he’s accusing an audience of rewarding a posture. Conservatism, in this frame, becomes a kind of reputational insurance policy: if you resist change, you can be cast as prudent, steady, grounded. Even if the real engine is just incuriosity.

The sting is in how he collapses a moral category into an intellectual one. “Conservative” carries prestige in many communities because it sounds like restraint, tradition, seriousness. “Only stupid” yanks the curtain back: sometimes the celebrated restraint is just an inability to process complexity, a fear of new information, a reflexive no dressed up as wisdom. Hubbard’s humor is surgical because it doesn’t argue; it re-labels. He turns a compliment into a misdiagnosis.

Context matters. Writing in an early 20th-century America churning through industrialization, urbanization, labor conflict, and new mass politics, Hubbard watched “common sense” get weaponized against reform. His newspaper-world cynicism targets the way public language launders motives: you can oppose change for selfish, lazy, or confused reasons and still be praised as “responsible.” The quote isn’t anti-conservative so much as anti-prestige: it’s a warning about how easily societies confuse inertia with judgment, and how flattering names can make mental stagnation look like principle.