Politics & Power Quote by Harold Rosenberg

Conservatism sells itself as a set of enduring virtues, but Rosenberg points out the trap: once those virtues are handed to actual people to enact, they come out as cartoons. The line is less a dismissal of “values” than a diagnosis of how politics degrades them. “Inevitably” is doing the heavy lifting. He’s not blaming a few bad actors; he’s arguing the translation from abstraction to governance reliably produces distortion.

The key word is “designated.” Conservative ideals are often marketed as organic, traditional, almost natural. Rosenberg reminds us they’re administered by appointed, elected, and incentivized operatives. Put “family values” in the hands of a party apparatus and you get purity tests, moral panics, and selective outrage. Put “law and order” in the hands of institutions and you get expanded coercion that can look less like stability than managed fear. The values aren’t merely misapplied; they’re simplified into propaganda-friendly shapes because mass politics needs symbols more than principles.

Context matters: Rosenberg, a mid-century critic shaped by the culture wars of his day, watched ideology turn into performance. His broader work is attuned to how public life pressures individuals to adopt roles, and how those roles hollow out meaning. Here, conservatism becomes a kind of ventriloquism: noble-sounding commitments voiced through functionaries who must win elections, please donors, and maintain coalitions. The result is caricature not because everyone is hypocritical, but because the machinery of representation rewards exaggeration, not fidelity.