Politics & Power Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

Talking yourself "red, white and blue in the face" is a perfectly aimed American skewering: Luce takes the familiar idiom of someone going "blue in the face" and repaints it in patriotic colors, turning civic virtue into a cosmetic rash. The line lands because it treats nationalism not as belief but as performance - a face-saving ritual where the face is literally what matters. The politicians aren't persuading; they're posturing, and the bodily image makes their rhetoric feel both exhausting and faintly ridiculous.

Luce, a dramatist with a politician's eye, understands how public speech becomes theater. "Talking themselves" is key: the audience disappears, replaced by self-enchantment and self-advertising. The phrase suggests a closed loop in which officials mistake volume and symbolism for substance, inflating their own sincerity until it bursts into visible strain. Patriotic language becomes a kind of vocal makeup: applied thickly enough, it can disguise a lack of policy, a lack of courage, or a lack of honesty.

The subtext is also gender-sharp, in that Luce is puncturing a mostly male political class whose authority is built on swagger and flags. Coming out of mid-century American life, when anti-communism, wartime unity, and televised politics amplified the rewards of flag-waving, the line reads like a warning about what happens when national identity is used as a substitute for argument. It's not anti-America; it's anti-cheap America - the kind you can summon on cue, until you turn a little sickly with it.