Politics & Power Quote by Robert Frost

Frost slips a family drama into the language of party politics, then lets the metaphor do the dirty work. “Republican” and “Democrat” aren’t policy positions here; they’re temperaments. The father, “always” Republican, stands for restraint, hierarchy, and the stern civic religion of rules: the parent as gatekeeper to the world’s consequences. The mother, “always” Democrat, signals sympathy, coalition-building, the instinct to soften the edges and keep the child inside the circle. It’s a joke with teeth, because it trades on how American politics is often experienced first as a mood you inherit at the dinner table, not a platform you study.

The line also winks at a deeper asymmetry: authority is easier to caricature than care. “Toward his son” frames politics as relational, not ideological; we become “conservative” or “liberal” depending on who’s asking for something and who gets to say no. Frost’s “always” is the satirical twist. Anyone who’s lived in a family knows roles blur, yet the exaggeration exposes how quickly we gender parental labor: discipline gets coded as paternal and principled, nurture as maternal and permissive. That’s the subtext, and it’s not entirely flattering to either side.

Context matters: Frost writes from an America where party labels carried old regional and class residues and where the household was treated as a miniature state. By importing those labels into parenting, he suggests that the first government most people meet is domestic, and the first campaign is for approval.