Leadership Quote by Mike Lowry

Democracy is usually treated like a malfunctioning appliance: it breaks, we complain, someone else should fix it. Mike Lowry flips that instinct on its head. His line is a rebuke disguised as plain talk, insisting that outrage in a representative system is never just a verdict on "them" in office; it's an indictment of "us" for tolerating, enabling, or passively outsourcing responsibility.

The intent is corrective, even paternal. Lowry isn't denying that elites can be corrupt or that institutions can fail. He's narrowing the moral escape hatch citizens love to keep open: if the system is ours, then its rot isn't an alien infection. It's the predictable result of what voters reward, what they ignore, and what they let slide between elections. The subtext is about complicity, but also power. Self-blame here isn't masochism; it's an argument for agency. You can't change what you refuse to own.

Context matters: Lowry came up in the late-20th-century era when political cynicism became a cultural posture and government was increasingly framed as the problem rather than a tool. In that climate, anger could become entertainment, a permanent attitude that asks nothing of the audience. Lowry's sentence works because it interrupts that consumer relationship to politics. It forces a harder question than "Who failed us?" Namely: "What did we choose, what did we trade away for convenience, and what are we willing to do about it now?"