Politics & Power Quote by James Thurber

Thurber, a humorist who made a career out of puncturing American self-seriousness, is warning that the quickest way to lose a country’s soul is to start treating the people who joke, imagine, and criticize as potential threats. The jab is aimed at a particular civic reflex: when a society gets anxious, it stops laughing first, then it starts policing the laughers.

“Complacently and fearfully” is a neat bit of Thurberian diagnosis. Complacency suggests the majority’s lazy confidence that suspicion is just “common sense,” nothing to worry about; fear supplies the accelerant that turns that laziness into policy, gossip, blacklists, and loyalty tests. He’s not only defending artists’ feelings. He’s describing a cultural immune system. When writers and artists are “suspected rather than respected,” it means dissent has been rebranded as disloyalty and ambiguity as deceit.

The real bite is in the consequence he names: a nation “no longer regarded” as having “humor or depth.” That’s not just a lament about vibe; it’s about reputation and power. A country that can’t tolerate satire advertises fragility. A country that can’t handle difficult art signals it can’t handle complexity in general. Thurber implies that you don’t measure national maturity by GDP or military might, but by how safely a cartoonist can be insolent.

The context is mid-century America, when censorship pressures, conformity culture, and the shadow of McCarthyism made suspicion a civic posture. Thurber’s line reads like a punchline with a bruise underneath: the joke stops being funny the moment the state starts keeping score.