Politics & Power Quote by Phillip Adams

Phillip Adams lands this like a joke with teeth: not a blanket dunk on politics or marketing, but a warning about what happens when persuasion stops pretending it cares about truth. The line works because it treats “advertising men” and “politicians” as two halves of the same machinery. Apart, each can do damage in familiar ways: advertising manufactures desire; politics manufactures consent. “Separated,” they’re merely “dangerous” - a manageable civic hazard. “Together,” they become “diabolical,” a word that’s intentionally overheated, almost comic-book moralism, which is exactly the point. Adams is mocking how easily the public is asked to accept a world where image is reality, and “diabolical” names the fusion as a kind of secular possession.

The subtext is about technique. Advertising perfects the art of emotional shortcuts: branding, repetition, fear, aspiration. Politics provides the stakes: power, policy, war, the distribution of money and dignity. Combine them and you don’t just sell shampoo with a story; you sell a leader, a referendum, a scapegoat. The electorate becomes a market segment, citizenship becomes customer loyalty, and disagreement becomes a “messaging problem.”

Contextually, Adams is speaking from a media-savvy Australia that watched modern campaigning import the language of focus groups and TV spots, then graduate into the era of spin doctors and permanent campaigns. It’s a line about the collapse of boundaries: when governance is optimized for persuasion, the public isn’t informed or represented - it’s managed.