Politics & Power Quote by James Wolcott

Wolcott’s move here is to deny the comforting storyline that propaganda is something done to us by shadowy institutions. The line is an accusation disguised as a diagnosis: the state and the press don’t invent deception out of thin air; they scale up the private fictions we already find useful. “Amplifications” is doing heavy work. It casts public lying less as a conspiracy than as a market response, a sound system turned up to broadcast what the audience has been humming all along.

The subtext is moral, not procedural. Wolcott isn’t offering a media-literacy checklist; he’s asking why certain stories feel like relief. The “government and media” are almost secondary characters. The real target is the citizen-consumer who wants reassurance without reckoning, certainty without cost, villains without complicity. By framing self-deception as the root, he flips outrage into self-interrogation: if you’re always being “conned,” what part of you is volunteering?

The rhetoric works because it weaponizes symmetry. “Stop being conned, stop conning yourself” turns a national complaint into a personal imperative, stripping away the alibi of helplessness. It also carries Wolcott’s critic’s sensibility: skepticism aimed not only upward at power but sideways at the audience’s appetite for narrative comfort. In a culture where distrust has become a lifestyle brand, he’s insisting that cynicism can be another form of self-consolation. The hardest truth isn’t that institutions lie; it’s that they’re often telling us what we’ve already decided to believe.