Politics & Power Quote by John McCarthy

McCarthy’s line weaponizes word-choice to draw a bright, insulting boundary inside the left: liberals as scolds who get off on prohibition, socialists as engineers who relish coercion. It’s not a policy argument so much as a moral caricature. “Forbidden” and “compulsory” are deliberately picked for their parental, bureaucratic chill; they smuggle in the conclusion that both camps are united less by empathy than by appetite for control.

The structure does the work. By calling each word “the most beautiful,” McCarthy flips the normal emotional valence. Beauty is supposed to attach to freedom, dignity, aspiration. He attaches it to commands. That inversion is the rhetorical tell: he’s indicting ideology as a kind of aesthetic preference for domination, not merely an intellectual mistake. “Contemporary liberal” is also doing heavy lifting. It implies a fall from some earlier liberalism associated with liberty, reframing modern liberals as the heirs of censorship culture and regulatory zeal rather than civil rights. The socialist, meanwhile, becomes the pure version of the same impulse: if liberals ban, socialists mandate.

Contextually, this reads like mid-to-late 20th century Cold War political rhetoric updated for culture-war fights over speech, public health, schooling, and morality. The subtext is tactical: if you can get voters to feel that the other side’s core pleasure is telling you “no” (or telling you “do it”), you don’t have to win on outcomes. You just have to make “government” taste like a sneer.