Politics & Power Quote by John Arbuthnot

A political party doesn’t usually get taken out by its enemies; it chokes on its own propaganda. Arbuthnot’s line is brutal because it treats “lies” not as a moral lapse but as a physical substance: once you ingest enough of your own spin, it stops being a tactic and becomes the organism. The verb “swallowing” does the real work here. Parties don’t just tell lies outwardly to win elections; they internalize them until the leadership, the base, and the party’s self-image can’t distinguish strategy from reality. At that point, correction feels like betrayal, and adaptation looks like weakness. The party keeps eating the story because it’s the only thing left that still tastes like unity.

The period matters. Arbuthnot lived in an England where party identity (Whig/Tory) was hardening into something recognizably modern: print culture, patronage networks, and factional loyalty were turning politics into a full-time industry. As a satirist-adjacent figure (close to Swift and Pope), he understood that public argument is often a performance staged for power, not truth. Calling him simply a “physicist” undersells that sensibility; the sentence reads like a clinical diagnosis. It’s less sermon than pathology report: repeated deception creates a closed informational system, and closed systems eventually fail.

The subtext is cynical and oddly democratic: voters aren’t the only ones being manipulated. Parties are also self-hypnotists, and the final punishment for a sustained lie is that it becomes the only language you can speak.