Politics & Power Quote by James Ellroy

Ellroy doesn’t offer a cynical aside here; he issues a diagnostic. If you can look at politics and not see crime, he implies, you’re not just naive-you’re malfunctioning. The insult (“a few screws loose”) matters: it recasts political innocence as a kind of mental defect, flipping the usual moral hierarchy. In Ellroy’s world, the “realist” is the one who expects corruption, coercion, and deals made in back rooms; the “idealists” are the unwell ones.

The line works because it compresses Ellroy’s whole hardboiled cosmology into a single provocation. “Politics” isn’t framed as a noble contest of ideas; it’s treated as a racket with better tailoring. “Crime” does double duty: literal illegality (bribery, intimidation, cover-ups) and the broader sense of sanctioned harm (policies that ruin lives while staying technically clean). Ellroy’s move is to erase the comforting boundary between the gangster and the statesman. One just has a badge, a press secretary, or a committee chair.

Context-wise, this sits cleanly in Ellroy’s Los Angeles of cops, fixers, and ambitious men laundering brutality through institutions. Writing out of the noir tradition-and out of an American century thick with scandals, COINTELPRO paranoia, and police/political collusion-Ellroy doesn’t ask you to be shocked by corruption. He dares you to stop performing shock. The intent is less to despair than to strip the audience of sentimental cover, forcing a bleaker, clearer-eyed literacy about power.