Politics & Power Quote by Leon Kass

A clean slap at the cult of “keeping up,” Kass’s line turns national policy into something like peer pressure with flags. The surface message is prudence, but the sharper target is imitation as a substitute for judgment. “Rush” does double duty: it’s about speed, yes, but also about the emotional velocity of envy, panic, and status anxiety that makes bad ideas feel inevitable once they’re fashionable elsewhere.

“Folly” is the key provocation. Kass isn’t warning against disagreement; he’s warning against consensus that’s unearned. The word assumes there are choices so self-evidently misguided that they don’t deserve the dignity of neutral terms like “reform” or “innovation.” That moral clarity is intentional. It forces the reader to ask: which imported practices are being sold as progress when they’re really just trend-chasing? In an era where policy models travel fast (from education standards to biotech regulation to social-policy experiments), Kass is skeptical of the argument from ubiquity: if everyone’s doing it, it must be wise.

The subtext is also a critique of technocratic mimicry. Nations often borrow institutional designs to signal modernity, not because the design fits their civic culture. Kass’s phrasing implies a harder, less glamorous task: self-governance requires the patience to be out of step. It’s a line that flatters independence while quietly indicting leaders who outsource moral responsibility to international momentum. If other nations are “practicing” folly, Kass suggests, the only intelligent response is not to join the rehearsal.