Politics & Power Quote by Jessica Mitford

Mitford’s line works because it flatters America while quietly skewering it. “Much faster” sounds like praise for efficiency, but she’s really pointing at a national tempo that turns even civic life into a sprint. The joke pivots on a tiny linguistic swap: in Britain, you “stand for election,” a phrase that implies steadiness, patience, and a kind of public service you can picture - someone planted in place, available to be judged. In America, you “run for office,” and the verb does the ideological work. Running implies striving, ambition, competition, cardio. It makes politics feel less like deliberation and more like sport.

The subtext is sharper than a simple Brits-versus-Americans jab. Mitford is after the way American political culture commodifies movement: speed as virtue, hustle as moral proof. “Run for office” also carries the sense of chasing something you want, not answering a call you’ve accepted. Office becomes a finish line, not a burden. Even the public is recast: not citizens weighing platforms, but spectators tracking a race.

Context matters: Mitford, an English-born journalist who made a career in the U.S. exposing institutional hypocrisy, had an ear for how euphemism and idiom hide power. This is her preferred scalpel - not a lecture, a quip. By treating grammar as cultural evidence, she suggests that America’s political imagination is kinetic to the point of restlessness, always in motion, rarely at rest long enough to be accountable.