Politics & Power Quote by Mark Steyn

Steyn’s line is built to launder an ideological warning through the voice of lived experience. By opening with “We immigrants,” he claims a kind of moral credential: not just opinion, but testimony. The little self-deprecating “sound a little hysterical” is a preemptive dodge - he concedes the emotional charge so critics can’t weaponize it, then immediately reframes that charge as rational alarm: we’re not panicking, we’re remembering.

The sentence is also a neat bit of pressure politics. “Places that have tried this” stays conveniently vague, collapsing wildly different national systems into a single cautionary tale. It invites the listener to supply their own feared example - Britain, Canada, the old Eastern Bloc - and to treat “socialized health care” as a slippery slope rather than a policy design. “We know where it leads” is the payoff: a prophecy with no details, which is precisely why it’s useful. The less specified the endpoint, the more adaptable the dread.

His second move - “Anybody who’s lived…” - is rhetorical annexation. It declares consensus by definition, turning dissent into disqualification: if you disagree, you must not have really been there. The claim that health care becomes “the dominant political issue” isn’t accidental; it implies a zero-sum politics where public systems crowd out everything else, quietly suggesting governmental overreach and perpetual crisis.

Contextually, the quote reads like a post-1990s, pre-ACA-era talking point sharpened for American audiences: importing an immigrant’s authority to argue that a European-style safety net is not compassionate modernity but a trap that reorganizes politics around scarcity, waiting, and state power.