Politics & Power Quote by Simon Bolivar

Bolivar is warning that political freedom can be bankrupted into authoritarianism. The trigger isn t only corruption or ambition; it s overhead. A state that grows too costly, especially one propped up by dependencies, stops being a civic project and becomes an extraction machine. To pay for itself it must centralize, compel, surveil. The rhetoric is clinical and escalating: expense becomes decay, decay becomes tyranny, tyranny hardens into despotism. He builds a causal chain that makes dictatorship feel less like a coup than a budget line item.

The subtext is Bolivar s own frustration with the grand, sprawling dream of postcolonial unity. After independence, Latin America faced weak tax bases, regional rivalries, foreign creditors, and elites eager to swap Spanish rule for local monopolies. Bolivar is not romanticizing smallness as quaint; he is diagnosing scale as a structural hazard in societies without stable institutions. Big republics, he suggests, don t just invite factionalism; they require constant improvisation. Mutability becomes a political climate: laws rewritten to chase crises, leaders empowered to manage emergencies that never end.

There s also a veiled rebuke to imported models. The Enlightenment fantasy that a constitution can mechanically produce liberty collapses when geography, debt, and patronage dictate governance. Bolivar argues that free government isn t preserved by slogans or elections but by a state light enough to administer without coercion. Stability, here, is less a mood than an accounting discipline with moral consequences.