Politics & Power Quote by Frank Rich

Frank Rich is drawing a hard border between two kinds of “truth,” and he’s doing it with the weary authority of someone who has spent a career watching politics manufacture reality on an industrial scale. The line doesn’t romanticize the soul so much as indict the political sphere: politics, in Rich’s world, is a system of incentives that rewards performance, tribal legibility, and strategic amnesia. “Truth” there is often provisional, negotiated, and weaponized. By contrast, “something really comes from the soul” points to expression that isn’t primarily trying to win, spin, or survive the next news cycle.

The specific intent is less mystical than ethical. Rich is arguing that sincerity can produce a kind of evidence politics can’t: the uncoerced admission, the inconvenient feeling, the unprofitable honesty. The phrasing matters. “I think” softens the claim just enough to avoid sounding like a sermon, while “you cannot find” lands like a verdict. It’s not that politics never touches truth; it’s that politics is structurally hostile to it.

Subtext: art, confession, and even genuine grief can cut through the rhetorical fog because they don’t need consensus. They can be singular, messy, contradictory - exactly the qualities political messaging tries to sand down. In context, coming from a journalist steeped in media and governance, the quote reads as both a critique of political theater and a defense of cultural work as a parallel record of what a society actually feels, not just what it claims to believe.