Politics & Power Quote by Harold Rosenberg

America sells itself as a nation in permanent motion, but Rosenberg needles the myth by calling that motion an "arrested metamorphosis" - transformation that begins, then gets frozen into a pose. The line is built like a trap: it offers two lanes, "success" and "fail[ure]", then reveals they end at the same dead stop. Either way, the destination is self-acceptance not as liberation but as capitulation.

The sting is in how he recasts achievement as a kind of immobilization. "Those who achieve success come to a halt" suggests the American dream doesn't culminate in becoming more fully alive; it culminates in becoming legible - a stable identity you can display, defend, and monetize. Success hardens into brand. Failure hardens into fatalism. Rosenberg's bleak symmetry implies that the culture's real product isn't upward mobility; it's settled personalities, people trained to stop revising themselves once the market has sorted them.

Rosenberg was writing in the mid-century shadow of mass society and conformity, when advertising, corporate life, and Cold War politics rewarded sameness and punished eccentricity. As an influential critic around Abstract Expressionism, he also had a front-row seat to a counter-ideal: the self as action, risk, and continual re-making. Against that, "accept themselves as they are" reads like an indictment of a culture that confuses identity with destiny. The subtext isn't self-love; it's surrender dressed as maturity.