Politics & Power Quote by Eric Sevareid

Change, for Sevareid, isn’t a buzzword or a self-help mantra; it’s a national fingerprint. Calling it America’s “most distinguished hallmark” flatters the country while quietly refusing the comforting myth of a fixed, knowable “real America.” The line works because it turns instability into identity: if change is the constant, then nostalgia becomes a kind of category error, a longing for something the society was never built to preserve.

Sevareid’s phrasing has the cool authority of a broadcast-era journalist who watched the mid-century churn up close: the New Deal’s expanded state, wartime mobilization, postwar suburbia, the Cold War’s permanent anxiety, civil rights’ moral reckoning, television’s mass persuasion. He’s not celebrating change as automatic progress; he’s marking it as an engine that remakes winners and losers with ruthless regularity. “Is and always has been” gives the sentence a historian’s sweep, but also a reporter’s warning: don’t interpret today’s upheaval as an anomaly. It’s the job description.

The subtext is a rebuke to both complacency and panic. To the complacent, it implies that institutions and norms cannot be treated as natural law; they’re provisional. To the panicked, it suggests that disruption is not evidence of national collapse, but of national motion. Sevareid’s intent is diagnostic, not devotional: he frames American society as perpetually unfinished, a place where the future keeps arriving early and demanding rent.