Faith & Spirit Quote by Patricia Hewitt

Hewitt’s line is a politician’s deft act of translation: it takes an emotionally loaded charge - “we’ve lost our soul” - and recasts it as a symptom of the age rather than proof of guilt. The move is strategic. “Accusation” implies courtroom drama: someone is prosecuting, someone is on trial. But instead of answering the charge head-on, she shifts the terrain to psychology and culture, where motives are murkier and blame is harder to pin. If the anxiety “resonates,” it’s not because the indictment is necessarily true; it’s because the public is primed to feel it.

The subtext is a warning about the politics of authenticity. Modern voters don’t just demand competence; they demand the performance of a coherent self. Parties, institutions, and leaders are expected to be “real” in a world shaped by branding, spin, and media cycles that reward posture over process. By calling authenticity a “very modern concern,” Hewitt hints that the yardstick itself may be unstable - a cultural obsession born from consumer choice, image management, and the suspicion that everyone is selling something.

Contextually, it reads like late-20th/early-21st-century center-left self-defense: an era when modernization, professionalized messaging, and policy pragmatism were criticized as technocratic, bloodless, or unmoored from core values. Hewitt isn’t denying the ache behind the accusation; she’s trying to domesticate it, turning a moral crisis into a diagnosable mood - and, implicitly, something a savvy politician can manage.