Politics & Power Quote by Tom Hayden

Hayden’s line weaponizes a simple moral math problem: why does proximity to American power soften judgment, while proximity to America’s enemies triggers outrage? The question isn’t asked to invite a polite debate. It’s a trapdoor. If you feel instinctive disgust at “a trip to Hanoi” but only vague discomfort at “American atrocities,” you’ve already revealed the hierarchy of loyalties he’s attacking.

Context matters: Hanoi is shorthand for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and Hayden is writing in the shadow of the 1960s antiwar movement, when dissenters were routinely branded naive at best, traitorous at worst. The trip is not really about travel; it’s about legitimacy. To visit the enemy is coded as crossing a line, while atrocities committed under an American flag are granted the status of regrettable policy errors. Hayden is calling out that asymmetry as a moral convenience disguised as patriotism.

The subtext is also media and political theater. “Unsettling” is the language of spectatorship, the kind of emotion that lets you keep watching without intervening. “Unconscionable” is the language of taboo, reserved not for violence itself but for violating consensus. Hayden flips the expected scandal: the true offense isn’t engagement with Hanoi, it’s the habituation to U.S. violence and the social penalties attached to naming it.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it refuses to argue on the state’s terms. It makes the reader account for their own reflexes, exposing how national identity can function less as ethics than as an alibi.