Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Moynihan’s line is a tidy two-step that flatters both tribes while quietly indicting them. He frames “conservative” and “liberal” not as partisan brands but as competing accounts of cause and effect: culture as the deep current, politics as the steering oar. The elegance is in the concession. Conservatives get the primacy of norms, family structure, social trust, and the unlegislated habits that make institutions function. Liberals get the counterpunch: the state is not merely a referee; it can rewrite incentives, expand rights, and build the scaffolding for new norms. Each “truth” is offered as a partial truth, which is the tell.

The subtext is Moynihan’s lifelong obsession with social breakdown and policy’s limits. Coming out of mid-century liberalism into the bruising fights over welfare, urban poverty, and crime, he watched Washington promise moral regeneration through programs and then recoil when results didn’t match rhetoric. “Culture…determines success” is a warning against technocratic overconfidence: you can’t spreadsheet your way out of a frayed social fabric. “Politics can change a culture” is a warning against fatalism: leaving culture alone can mean letting entrenched injustice masquerade as tradition.

Context matters: this is a Cold War-era Democrat with a sociologist’s instincts and a politician’s realism. He’s not splitting the difference; he’s setting a trap for absolutists. If you pretend culture is everything, you absolve power. If you pretend politics is everything, you dodge responsibility for behavior. Moynihan’s intent is to force a harder question: what exactly should government try to change, and what must a society choose to change itself?