Time & Perspective Quote by Jeane Kirkpatrick

Fashion is doing the heavy lifting here. Kirkpatrick doesn’t argue Marxism down so much as she frames it as a contagion: “tremendously fashionable,” then “infected,” then the final punchline, the church. The rhetoric is clinical and faintly disdainful, the way you’d talk about a virus moving through crowded institutions. By choosing that metaphor, she sidesteps the possibility that Marxism might have intellectual or moral appeal; it becomes an external agent, not a set of ideas people adopt for reasons. That’s the intent: to delegitimize by pathologizing.

The subtext is a warning about elite capture. “Major institutions” is a broad net that quietly includes universities, media, bureaucracies, and international bodies, the very infrastructure that shapes how a society thinks. “Many countries of the world” adds geopolitical scale, implying a coordinated, era-defining drift. The church is strategically last because it’s supposed to be the holdout: a moral institution imagined as insulated from ideological fads. If even that sanctuary is compromised, then nothing is safe from the zeitgeist.

Context matters: Kirkpatrick was a Cold War diplomat and a signature hawk of the Reagan era, attentive to how ideology travels through institutions and legitimizes political movements. Read against debates over liberation theology and left-leaning clerical activism, the line is less about theology than about authority. She’s policing boundaries: faith should not provide moral cover for revolutionary politics. The sly, almost conversational “we shouldn’t be too surprised” invites the reader to share her skepticism, turning alarm into common sense.