Politics & Power Quote by Felix Frankfurter

American political culture loves the fantasy of the reluctant hero: the plainspoken outsider who wanders into Washington, cleans house, and leaves unsullied. Frankfurter punctures that romance with a lawyerly jab. “We forget” isn’t gentle; it’s an indictment of a convenient national amnesia that treats “professional politician” as a slur. His point is not that politics should be a guild, but that governing is a craft - learned, practiced, and sharpened under pressure.

The Lincoln example is doing heavy rhetorical lifting. By calling Lincoln “a professional politician,” Frankfurter flips the moral hierarchy. Lincoln gets sanctified as the honest amateur, yet he spent decades building coalitions, reading rooms, mastering procedure, and understanding voters as a real, not hypothetical, public. Frankfurter’s subtext: if even Lincoln required political professionalism to navigate civil war, why do we pretend competence arrives via purity?

Context matters. As a New Deal-era jurist and close FDR adviser, Frankfurter lived in a moment when “experts” and “politicians” were being attacked as corrupt machine-men while the demands of modern government (economic crisis, war, administration) required experienced operators. The line is also defensive: it protects politics as legitimate work against the elitist pose that disdains it, while quietly warning reformers that moral fervor without institutional know-how tends to produce symbolism, not results. In 2026 terms, it’s an anti-outsider slogan disguised as a historical reminder: stop fetishizing innocence; start valuing competence.