"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return"
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Vidal’s barb lands because it flatters no one, not even the reader. “Genius” is deliberately inverted: the ruling class isn’t praised for building anything admirable, but for perfecting a psychological trick. Power, he suggests, doesn’t merely win elections or write laws; it engineers the boundaries of what feels askable. The real accomplishment is not exploitation itself, but the successful prevention of the question: Why this arrangement, and why accept it?
The subtext is pure Vidal: contempt for American innocence as a civic identity. “Kept a majority ... from ever questioning” frames inequality less as a math problem than as an education problem, a media problem, a narrative problem. The people “drudge along,” a word that evokes not heroic labor but grinding fatigue, the kind that leaves little energy for political imagination. Heavy taxes become the punchline, because Vidal is needling a familiar American complaint and twisting it: you’re right to feel fleeced, but you’ve been coached to blame the wrong villains and demand the wrong fixes.
Context matters. Vidal wrote and spoke as a lifelong critic of empire, corporate capture, and a political class he often treated as a single club with two costumes. This line sits in the late-20th-century arc where wages stagnated, unions weakened, and “taxpayer” rhetoric substituted for class language. His intent isn’t policy detail; it’s provocation. The sentence is designed to make complacency feel slightly ridiculous and complicity feel, uncomfortably, like the system’s most renewable resource.
The subtext is pure Vidal: contempt for American innocence as a civic identity. “Kept a majority ... from ever questioning” frames inequality less as a math problem than as an education problem, a media problem, a narrative problem. The people “drudge along,” a word that evokes not heroic labor but grinding fatigue, the kind that leaves little energy for political imagination. Heavy taxes become the punchline, because Vidal is needling a familiar American complaint and twisting it: you’re right to feel fleeced, but you’ve been coached to blame the wrong villains and demand the wrong fixes.
Context matters. Vidal wrote and spoke as a lifelong critic of empire, corporate capture, and a political class he often treated as a single club with two costumes. This line sits in the late-20th-century arc where wages stagnated, unions weakened, and “taxpayer” rhetoric substituted for class language. His intent isn’t policy detail; it’s provocation. The sentence is designed to make complacency feel slightly ridiculous and complicity feel, uncomfortably, like the system’s most renewable resource.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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