Politics & Power Quote by Emma Goldman

Goldman’s jab lands because it’s aimed inward, at the movement she’s supposed to be building. She’s not flattering “the American radical” as a brave outsider; she’s diagnosing a political temperament shaped by a young, restless country that mistakes motion for direction. “Indefinite, uncertain” isn’t just an insult. It’s an autopsy of a scene where conviction is elective, where ideologies are tried on like outfits, and where the appetite for novelty can outrun the discipline required for revolt.

The phrasing is deliberately culinary and humiliating: “intellectual hash” suggests leftovers thrown together, edible only if you’re desperate. “Neither taste nor character” goes further, accusing radicals of lacking not only coherence but also style - a moral-aesthetic failing in Goldman’s worldview, where liberation is supposed to produce sharper instincts, not dulled ones. Taste here is political judgment; character is the courage to choose a line and live with its consequences.

Context matters: Goldman was organizing in an America of mass immigration, industrial exploitation, sensationalist newspapers, and factional left politics split between anarchists, socialists, labor unions, and single-issue crusades. The movement was surveilled, infiltrated, and routinely pushed into defensive contortions. Her critique hints at a deeper anxiety: a radicalism that becomes a grab bag of tactics and slogans is easy to police, easy to caricature, and impossible to translate into sustained power. She’s warning that contradiction isn’t pluralism; it’s vulnerability disguised as openness.