Politics & Power Quote by Eric Sevareid

Sevareid’s line is a neat little trap for ego: it flatters the reader into wanting to be counted among the “men,” then quietly indicts almost everyone who treats politics as a mirror rather than a machine. The phrasing is bluntly gendered in its era-specific way, but the real divide he’s naming isn’t biological. It’s performative. “Boys” chase the costume of leadership - the title, the camera angle, the belonging to history. “Men” chase the unglamorous verb work: bargaining, legislating, taking the hit, accepting partial victories that don’t photograph well.

The sentence works because it turns ambition into a moral category. Wanting “to be something” isn’t just vanity; it’s politics as identity project, where personal mythmaking displaces outcomes. Sevareid wrote as a mid-century American journalist who watched modern mass media harden public life into a stage. In that context, “always has been” isn’t a factual claim so much as a weary shrug: the temptation to prefer status over service is perennial, but television and celebrity culture supercharge it. The electorate doesn’t merely suffer this; it collaborates, rewarding performance with attention and punishing process as boring, tainted, or insufficiently pure.

Underneath the aphorism is a warning about democratic decay. When politics becomes a vehicle for self-branding, competence looks like compromise, and compromise looks like betrayal. Sevareid isn’t romanticizing “men” as saints; he’s arguing for a baseline seriousness: measure leaders by what they build, not what they project.