Politics & Power Quote by Allan Bloom

Bloom’s complaint lands like a cold diagnosis: the problem isn’t that students disagree with America’s political tradition, but that they can’t even feel it strongly enough to disagree well. “Ignorant and cynical” is a deliberate pairing. Ignorance alone might invite teaching; cynicism alone might still be fueled by knowledge. Put together, they produce a deadened posture: students who assume the inheritance is corrupt without knowing what it actually claims, and who therefore can’t mount critique that bites.

The key phrase is “political heritage,” which Bloom treats less as a set of facts than as a moral-intellectual vocabulary: constitutionalism, liberal rights, citizenship, the tension between liberty and equality. His subtext is that universities have stopped transmitting that vocabulary with any seriousness. When he says students “lack the wherewithal,” he’s not talking about grit. He means intellectual equipment: the texts, historical memory, and standards of judgment that make inspiration possible and criticism consequential.

Context matters: Bloom is writing in the late Cold War, reacting to post-60s academia, the rise of relativism, and a campus culture he sees as prematurely disenchanted. The line is also a defensive maneuver. By insisting students can be neither “inspired” nor “seriously critical,” he positions himself against two easy targets at once: boosterism (unthinking reverence) and fashionable disdain (unthinking dismissal). The rhetorical trick is that he defines the university’s failure not as political bias but as impoverishment of spirit and literacy. It’s an argument for education as initiation into a tradition robust enough to withstand attack - and worth attacking in the first place.