Politics & Power Quote by Frank Rich

Frank Rich lands this jab by hijacking one of America’s most sanctified lines and flipping its moral polarity. F.D.R.’s “nothing to fear but fear itself” was a rhetorical vaccine: it named panic as the enemy and recruited citizens into steadiness. Rich recasts that civic therapy as a template for modern political theater, where John Ashcroft isn’t fighting fear, he’s auditioning for it. The phrase “delighted to play the part” is doing heavy work: fear becomes a role, not a condition, implying performance, camera awareness, and calculation rather than sober governance.

The subtext is that post-9/11 power doesn’t merely respond to public anxiety; it curates and amplifies it. Rich’s “Fear Itself” isn’t abstract dread, it’s a character with a script: warnings, alerts, symbolic crackdowns, and the insinuation that safety requires deference. By casting Ashcroft as an actor, Rich also suggests a kind of genre shift from statesmanship to melodrama. The target isn’t just policy but temperament: a willingness to dramatize threats as a way to expand authority.

“Lets his imagination run riot” sharpens the indictment. It hints at threat inflation, speculative scenarios treated as near-certainties, and a prosecutorial creativity that can outrun evidence. Contextually, this reads as a critique of the early War on Terror’s civil-liberties tradeoffs: the Patriot Act climate, the rhetorical policing of dissent, and the political utility of permanent emergency. Rich’s wit works because it turns a revered presidential mantra into an accusatory mirror: what once steadied the nation now indicts those who govern by spooking it.