Politics & Power Quote by Edward Dahlberg

America as a three-ring circus: appetite, libido, and salvation, each sold with the same hustler’s confidence. Dahlberg’s line works because it treats national character less like a Constitution-bound ideal and more like a recurring mood swing - bodily cravings on one side, metaphysical cravings on the other, and the market savvy to package both. “Food” and “sex” aren’t just vices here; they’re shorthand for a culture that distrusts stillness and converts desire into identity. You don’t merely eat or sleep with someone; you join a lifestyle, buy the supplements, tell the story.

The knife twist is “revivalists.” Dahlberg yokes the sacred language of Protestant awakenings to the profane churn of consumption. The subtext is that Americans don’t so much believe as they binge-believe, cyclically, publicly, and with a salesman’s grin: yesterday’s conversion becomes today’s relapse, which becomes next week’s recommitment. Even “spirit” feels like another commodity, a product with branding and testimonials.

Context matters: Dahlberg wrote in the long shadow of the Great Depression and into the era of mass advertising and postwar abundance, when “more” became a civic virtue and evangelism and commerce learned each other’s tricks. His cynicism isn’t anti-pleasure so much as anti-innocence. The line implies that American idealism survives by laundering itself through sensation and spectacle, turning private hunger into public crusade. The country, in Dahlberg’s view, doesn’t seek moderation; it seeks the next revival.