Politics & Power Quote by Tom Hayden

It’s a one-sentence miniature of the culture war before we had that phrase: Tom Hayden framing his political legitimacy as something his enemies tried to revoke, not by beating him on policy, but by criminalizing his biography. The line is built on a blunt tally - “Twice” - that does two things at once. It signals persistence (they kept coming) and pettiness (they had nothing better). Hayden doesn’t name a bill, a vote, or a committee. He names a ritual of exclusion, the attempt to keep him from even taking the chair. That’s the point: delegitimization as a tactic.

The trigger is “my trips to Hanoi,” shorthand for the Vietnam-era taboo that antiwar activism could be recoded as treason. Hanoi isn’t just geography; it’s a political cudgel. In the late 1960s and 70s, visiting North Vietnam carried a freighted implication: you weren’t dissenting, you were consorting. Hayden’s subtext is that the right’s moral panic needed an enemy more than it needed accuracy, and that procedure - “seating” - became a proxy battlefield for loyalty.

There’s also a self-portrait embedded here: Hayden as the movement figure who insisted on entering formal power without laundering his past. He’s telling you how the establishment tried to enforce amnesia as the price of admission. By reducing the conflict to a clean, almost bureaucratic anecdote, he makes the politics look uglier: democracy isn’t only threatened by censorship; it’s threatened by gatekeeping dressed up as patriotism.