Deferential invisibility inside power corrupts an idealist’s stated goals

Evidence

The man who had had to wait outside so many offices liked being on the inside of everything. He talked—perhaps a bit more than was discreet—about what Jimmy Walker had said to him and about what he had said to Walker. He liked to describe how some assemblyman had refused his instructions on a bill and how he had told the Governor about it and how the Governor had laid down the law, and, thereafter, how the assemblyman had jumped to obey when he, Moses, gave him instructions. If what he was on the inside of was a world he would once have despised, he did not seem to remember those earlier feelings now. Reform work was, more and more, an irritating intrusion on his time. The hours he put in at the New York State Association office each week became fewer and fewer. The gaps between issues of the State Bulletin, once a monthly publication, grew longer and longer. And when the Bulletin did appear now, it made less and less pretense of being a reform pamphlet. More and more, it resembled a Tammany Hall broadside in support of Al Smith. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 620

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the ch8 claim that even reform agencies muted criticism once their friends held power — Moses’ own reform organ becomes a Tammany broadside. — connects to: Belle Moskowitz’s tutelage converted Moses from idealist into a practical politician — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 595; Crusading moral idealism, denied other outlets, turned inward against external change — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1782; Idealism’s supremacy of thought masks thought’s practical impotence — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 518 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Independent thinking endangers the ideals one clings to #complicates (0.78) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1270
• Crusading moral idealism, denied other outlets, turned inward against external change #complicates (0.75) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1782
• Idealism’s supremacy of thought masks thought’s practical impotence #complicates (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 518
• Electricity’s invisibility fueled idealist religious and philosophical thought #complicates (0.70) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 784