Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard is doing what he does best: taking the polite fiction of democracy and stress-testing it until the seams show. The line runs on a deliberately blunt causal chain - frighten enough people, rule everyone - and that bluntness is the point. It mimics the logic of emergency politics: complexity collapses, nuance is recoded as weakness, and the public mood becomes a lever. By framing fear as a scalable tool ("enough people") rather than a universal condition, he’s describing a threshold effect: you don’t need to terrify the whole electorate, just a critical mass whose panic can be translated into mandates, polling majorities, or a permission structure for crackdowns.

The subtext is a warning about how democratic legitimacy can be rented. In theory, rights are constraints on power; in practice, Bovard argues, rights become negotiable when leaders can narrate a threat that feels immediate and contagious. "Ticket" is a sharp word here: fear isn’t merely a reaction, it’s an admission pass - a credential that lets officials enter spaces they’re normally barred from. Once you accept the premise that safety requires exception, the exception spreads "across the board."

Contextually, this fits Bovard’s long-running critique of civil-liberties rollbacks in the wake of crises - terrorism, war, crime waves, pandemics, whatever headline supplies the adrenaline. His cynicism isn’t about voters being stupid; it’s about systems being opportunistic. Democracy doesn’t immunize against authoritarian moves, it can launder them, because fear doesn’t have to defeat the ballot box - it just has to win it.