Politics & Power Quote by Tim Robbins

Robbins is trying to pry open a door that American politics loves to weld shut: the idea that party labels are moral verdicts. Coming from an actor long associated with progressive causes, the line functions as a credibility flex and a corrective. He’s signaling, to his own side as much as to conservatives, that empathy isn’t proprietary and that economic ideology doesn’t automatically imply cruelty.

The phrase “a great number” is strategic. It’s not “all,” which would read as naive, and it’s not “some,” which would feel like a token concession. He’s arguing for a meaningful constituency inside the GOP that can be engaged rather than written off. “Economically conservative” is also a neat bit of political fencing: it isolates a policy orientation (taxes, regulation, spending) from the cultural warfare that tends to dominate Republican branding. By separating the balance-sheet instincts from the hard-edged rhetoric, Robbins creates space for a version of conservatism that isn’t synonymous with resentment.

Then comes the emotional payload: “hearts and a consciousness about their country.” That’s deliberately old-fashioned language, almost civic-religious. He’s appealing to patriotism as a shared moral currency, a way to talk about responsibility without sounding like a partisan scold. Subtext: if we keep pretending the other side is soulless, we guarantee the worst actors become the only ones left standing. Contextually, it reads like a post-9/11 and post-culture-war intervention - a plea for coalition-building in an era when hating the opposite team has become a political identity.