Politics & Power Quote by Richard J. Daley

Daley’s line is a politician’s growl dressed up as realism: “face it,” “that’s the way it is,” “we have to accept it.” The phrasing performs inevitability, as if social disorder were a weather system, not a tangle of policy, policing, poverty, and protest. It’s a neat rhetorical judo move: by declaring a diagnosis with the tone of a hard-nosed truth-teller, he smuggles in a moral verdict and a proposed response without stating it outright.

The subtext is less about “fun” than about legitimacy. Calling looting “celebrate” isn’t naive; it’s strategic contempt. He collapses grief, rage, and political demonstration into a single vulgar appetite, turning collective action into criminal leisure. That framing flatters the “silent” law-abiding public and isolates the protester as an alien species. It also positions the state as the only adult in the room, entitled to crack down because the crowd has supposedly forfeited any civic motive.

Context matters: Daley was Chicago’s hard-edged machine mayor, speaking in an era when urban uprisings and antiwar protests were televised into middle-class living rooms, and when his administration became synonymous with aggressive policing (especially around the 1968 Democratic Convention). The quote reads like preemptive permission: if disorder is America’s new idea of a party, then force becomes not a choice but a duty. The brilliance, and the danger, is how quickly it turns a contested political moment into a settled story about national decay.