Daily Inspiration Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal’s line lands like a cocktail-party joke with a knife in it: democracy reduced to an expensive ritual where nothing is at stake and no one is meaningfully different. The opener, “Apparently,” is doing sly work. It’s feigned innocence, a raised eyebrow that signals he’s repeating the official story only to expose it as marketing. What follows is a definition built out of negations: elections “without issues,” candidates “interchangeable.” The subtext is that procedural legitimacy has become a substitute for actual choice.

The phrasing mimics a civics textbook, but Vidal flips it into an indictment of late-20th-century American politics: the rise of consultant-driven campaigns, television-era messaging, donor dependency, and a narrowing policy bandwidth that makes party competition feel like brand competition. “At great cost” isn’t just a complaint about waste; it’s the tell that the system is self-selecting. When elections require enormous capital, candidates converge toward the preferences of those who can pay for the megaphone. The public gets spectacle; power gets continuity.

Vidal, a novelist with a historian’s memory and a satirist’s impatience, is also mocking the complacent faith that elections automatically equal democracy. He’s arguing that democracy can hollow out while still looking busy: lots of votes, lots of ads, lots of punditry, and a careful avoidance of “issues” that might threaten the underlying order. The joke hurts because it’s plausible: a system can be impeccably democratic in form while quietly oligarchic in function.