Politics & Power Quote by Ann Coulter

Coulter’s line is engineered to make “raise taxes” sound less like a policy choice than a nervous tic. The anaphora is the weapon: the repeated “When... Democrats wanted... Now...” creates a drumbeat of inevitability, inviting the reader to stop evaluating circumstances and start treating the opponent as a fixed type. By cycling through peace, war, surplus, and recession, she stitches together mutually contradictory moments to argue that context doesn’t matter because Democrats are allegedly incapable of reacting to context at all.

The intent is less to litigate fiscal history than to frame taxation as a moral tell. In this construction, “raise taxes” functions like a character flaw: compulsive, punitive, immune to evidence. That’s the subtextual move common to partisan polemic at the turn of the 2000s: don’t debate marginal rates or deficits; question the other side’s motives and temperament. If they always want to tax, then any tax proposal becomes suspect before it’s even described.

Context matters here. Coulter rose in an era when conservative media rewarded slogan-ready asymmetry: Democrats as reflexive tax-and-spend, Republicans as situational pragmatists. The line also borrows the cadence of stand-up, compressing an argument into a punchline that feels like common sense because it’s rhythmic. Its persuasive power comes from that rhythm - and from omission. By erasing what taxes are for, who pays, and how the economy actually looked in each moment, the quote converts policy into identity politics: not “Is this tax good?” but “What kind of people would want taxes at all?”