Politics & Power Quote by Bill Moyers

Moyers is trying to make an old American anxiety feel newly urgent: the fear that the country can keep the rituals of democracy while quietly outsourcing its substance. Calling elites a "regime of their own" is calculated provocation. "Regime" is a word Americans reserve for places we imagine as corrupt or unfree; he imports that stigma back home to argue that capture has become governance. The phrase doesn’t just accuse individuals of greed, it suggests a parallel state with its own logic, incentives, and protections.

The sharpest move is "privatizing democracy". Privatization usually sells itself as efficiency, innovation, choice. Moyers flips it into a moral indictment: if democracy becomes a market, then citizenship becomes a product and access becomes a fee. It’s not only that money influences politics; it’s that political rights get converted into something you can buy, rent, or withhold.

Then he locks the argument into a simple visual: everything flows "up". That directional metaphor is doing a lot of work. It collapses complicated policy fights into an intuitive story of gravity reversed, a system engineered to move wealth and power away from ordinary people. The subtext is that this is not an accident or a temporary imbalance; it’s a design feature.

Context matters: Moyers came of age in an era when broadcast journalism still claimed a civic mission, and he spent decades watching deregulation, tax policy, and campaign finance tilt toward concentrated wealth. The quote lands as both lament and warning: if the public accepts this upward-only pipeline as normal, democracy becomes branding, not power.