Politics & Power Quote by James L. Buckley

Buckley’s sentence is built like a trapdoor: it starts with a polite “Unfortunately,” then drops the reader into a critique of two institutions Americans love to hate but can’t stop watching - the press and the reform industry. As a politician (and a Buckley, with all the family’s suspicion of fashionable moral crusades), he isn’t merely complaining about bad coverage. He’s alleging a successful rhetorical coup: the media have “equated” reform with restriction, turning a technical policy debate into a cultural reflex.

The key maneuver is in the pronouns. “The media” are cast as a coherent actor with “self-interest,” a phrase that mimics the language of market motives and lobbying - a way to strip journalism of its civic halo. Then comes the populist pivot: “just about everyone else’s freedom.” Buckley frames campaign-finance or election-law reform as something imposed by elites who remain exempt, or at least insulated. That “everyone else” flattens distinctions between corporate money, unions, activists, and ordinary citizens, suggesting they’re all equally muzzled while the press continues to editorialize and amplify.

Context matters: Buckley’s career ran through the post-Watergate era and the long fight over campaign finance, when “reform” became a near-sacred word in Washington. His line tries to poison that word by attaching it to censorship, not clean government. The subtext is strategic: don’t argue about donation caps and disclosure rules; argue about speech. If you can make reform sound like a crackdown on political expression, the reformers inherit the stigma of authoritarians, and the media become accomplices rather than referees.