Politics & Power Quote by Elia Kazan

A director who built his career staging moral pressure cookers doesn’t frame this as a manifesto; he frames it as a broken habit. Kazan’s line isn’t “America is bad.” It’s the quieter, harder admission that the old national storyline - decency versus corruption, with decency guaranteed a third-act comeback - has stopped feeling structurally true. The ellipsis does a lot of work: it mimics someone searching for the familiar uplift, then refusing to fake it.

Kazan’s intent reads like a confession aimed as much at himself as at the country. He made films that obsess over complicity and betrayal (On the Waterfront is practically a civics lesson shot like noir), and his own public identity was permanently marked by naming names during the HUAC era. That history makes the sentence sting: the man who once defended cooperation with power as a necessary moral act is now saying he no longer trusts the system to redeem that act. Subtext: if “the good” doesn’t reliably win, then the compromises people make in its name start looking less like strategy and more like surrender.

Context matters because Kazan lived through the New Deal promise, the war’s moral clarity, the Cold War’s paranoia, and the long hangover of televised cynicism. His disillusionment isn’t fashionable gloom; it’s the verdict of someone who watched American institutions repeatedly convert idealism into paperwork, punishment, and PR. The line lands because it refuses melodrama while quietly detonating the comforting myth that history is an automatic escalator toward justice.