Politics & Power Quote by Glenn Danzig

Danzig delivers this like a chorus line: blunt, binary, meant to land in the gut before it ever hits the brain. Coming from a musician whose brand has long been anti-pious and anti-authority, the point isn’t a policy brief. It’s alienation as a political identity. The intent is to name a common, barroom-feel diagnosis of American politics: both parties are sprinting toward the edges, leaving ordinary people stranded in the middle, watching the culture war eat everything else.

The subtext is doing two things at once. First, it flattens complexity into a relatable emotional map: “left” becomes social distance (people “can’t relate”), not ideology. That phrasing matters. He’s not arguing the Democrats are wrong; he’s arguing they’ve become culturally unintelligible. Second, by saying Republicans are “trying” to go “totally” right, he implies a kind of opportunistic extremism, a willful performance rather than an organic drift. The symmetry is rhetorical, not analytical: it frames both sides as equally unserious in their own ways, which grants the speaker a third position - the outsider who sees the scam.

Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st-century rock-to-talk-radio pipeline where “anti-establishment” gets translated into “anti-both-parties,” and where “relatability” becomes the currency of legitimacy. The line isn’t subtle; it’s diagnostic shorthand, designed to sound like lived experience. That’s why it works: it turns political fatigue into a simple story with clear villains and a clear hero - the disaffected listener.