Politics & Power Quote by Robert Kennedy

Kennedy is doing something quietly audacious here: he treats diversity not as a social complication to be managed, but as a deliberate national weapon against bigotry. The phrasing "America's answer" carries the cadence of a civic creed, as if pluralism is as foundational as the Constitution itself. And by singling out "the intolerant man", he personalizes intolerance, shrinking it from a mass movement into a moral failure in one human being. The move is rhetorical judo: the bigot wants purity and sameness; Kennedy counters with an America that wins precisely by refusing the fantasy of homogeneity.

The subtext is also defensive, in the best sense. In the mid-20th-century U.S., fights over civil rights, immigration, and Cold War identity made "diversity" easy to frame as chaos or disloyalty. Kennedy anticipates that attack by rooting pluralism in "our heritage of religious freedom". That's not accidental. Religious freedom is the most widely accepted, almost untouchable, origin story for American tolerance. By tying diversity to that heritage, he recasts pluralism as inheritance rather than experiment, continuity rather than rupture.

There's also a strategic narrowing: he doesn't claim diversity makes everyone kinder; he claims it's the appropriate response to intolerance. The point isn't sentimental harmony. It's resilience. A nation habituated to difference becomes harder to hijack by those selling fear as unity. In Kennedy's hands, diversity isn't just moral posture; it's democratic self-defense.