Leadership Quote by Eugene McCarthy

McCarthy’s jab lands because it flatters the Senate’s self-image while gutting it. Calling the chamber “the last primitive society” flips the usual reverence for tradition into anthropology: not statesmen deliberating for the republic, but a tribe reenacting status rituals. The line is funny because it’s plausible. Anyone who’s watched the Senate’s choreography - seniority, “Mr. President,” deference to committee barons, the reverent hush around “institutionalists” - recognizes the totems.

The “elders of the tribe” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s age and tenure, the way longevity becomes moral authority regardless of intellectual freshness. Underneath, it’s a critique of how the Senate converts time served into power served: gatekeeping dressed up as wisdom. McCarthy, the antiwar insurgent who challenged Lyndon Johnson in 1968, knew how punishing the Senate can be to dissenters. You don’t just argue policy; you violate a pecking order.

Then comes “the territorial imperative,” a phrase borrowed from ethology that turns federalism’s lofty rhetoric into animal behavior. Senators aren’t merely representing constituents; they’re defending turf - state interests, committee jurisdictions, partisan fiefdoms - often with the reflexive aggression of creatures protecting a nesting site. That’s why the chamber can feel both majestically procedural and stubbornly anti-responsive: its incentives reward boundary maintenance, not problem solving.

McCarthy’s intent isn’t to sneer at democracy but to puncture the romance of “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” He’s warning that when tradition becomes tribal worship, procedure stops being a means and becomes the point.