Politics & Power Quote by George McGovern

McGovern isn’t just condemning a war; he’s indicting the class of people who keep finding new reasons to wage one. “The Establishment center” is a deliberately sharpened target: not the obvious hawks on the right or the idealists on the left, but the credentialed middle that sells itself as prudent, bipartisan, and adult. He’s arguing that the most dangerous ideology in Washington is managerial consensus - the belief that power, properly staffed and politely justified, can’t become monstrous.

The language is built to rupture that consensus. “Stupidest and cruelest” fuses incompetence with brutality, refusing the comforting story that even a bad war is at least strategically serious. He’s stripping the enterprise of its alibis: not a tragic necessity, not a miscalculation, but an avoidable moral fiasco dressed up as policy. Calling it “a moral and political disaster” links ethics to governance, warning that you don’t get to torch legitimacy abroad and keep it intact at home.

Then comes the metaphor that does the real work: “a terrible cancer.” Cancer is systemic, progressive, and self-consuming; it implies metastasis into institutions, language, and civic trust. The subtext is that war doesn’t merely kill people overseas - it warps budgets, corrodes truth-telling, militarizes decision-making, and teaches the public to accept cruelty as normal.

Context matters: McGovern, a decorated WWII veteran turned Vietnam-era antiwar candidate, is weaponizing patriotism against militarism. The “soul of our nation” isn’t sentimentality; it’s a warning that the center’s biggest failure is pretending moral cost is an externality.