Politics & Power Quote by Peggy Noonan

Noonan’s move here is to puncture the fantasy of catharsis. Elections are supposed to be narrative endings: a verdict, a mandate, a fresh chapter. By insisting that 2008 “settled nothing,” she rejects the popular script that Obama’s win closed the book on the Bush era, the Iraq hangover, or the culture-war fatigue. The line works because it denies the reader the comfort of punctuation; it’s not a period, not even a semicolon.

The geological metaphor is doing heavy political work. “Beneath the crust” suggests that what’s driving American conflict isn’t just policy disagreement or campaign optics but deep structural pressures: demographic change, economic dislocation, media fragmentation, and the long aftershocks of 9/11 and the financial crisis. Tectonic plates move slowly, invisibly, until they don’t. That’s the implied warning: surface calm is not stability, and “normal” political rhythms can conceal accumulating stress.

Subtextually, Noonan is also critiquing elite overconfidence. The pundit class loves to treat an election as a decisive national mood ring. Her image says the opposite: politics is merely the surface expression of forces too large for a single victory speech to manage. Coming from a conservative writer who had watched Republicans lose the presidency amid recession and war, it reads as both diagnosis and self-protection: don’t mistake defeat for resolution, and don’t mistake triumph for consensus.

In 2008’s immediate glow, she’s already pointing toward the next rupture. The plates are moving; the quake is still ahead.