Politics & Power Quote by Lionel Trilling

Trilling’s line is a scalpel aimed at the liberal conscience: it exposes how egalitarian language can hide an aristocracy of taste, education, and self-regard. The syntax does the damage. “We who are liberal and progressive” is a self-congratulatory credential check, a clubby “we” that assumes moral sophistication as a shared starting point. Then comes the feint: “know that the poor are our equals in every sense.” It sounds like a civics-text affirmation, until the last clause snaps shut like a trap: “except that of being equal to us.” Equality becomes a one-way mirror. The poor are declared equal in the abstract but denied equal standing in the eyes of the people doing the declaring.

The intent isn’t to mock compassion; it’s to indict paternalism as a structural feature of progressive identity. Trilling, a mid-century critic steeped in the tensions between high culture, politics, and moral psychology, understood that liberalism can become less a program than a performance: sympathy as a form of status. The subtext is brutal: the “progressive” self often needs the poor not only as beneficiaries but as proof of virtue, and proof requires distance. If the poor were truly “equal to us,” the liberal would have to surrender the comforting hierarchy that makes benevolence feel like leadership.

Context matters: writing in an era when American liberalism was consolidating its postwar authority, Trilling warns that good intentions can fossilize into condescension. The quote works because it turns a proud identity label into an accusation, using the liberal’s own rhetoric as evidence against them.