Politics & Power Quote by Charles Edison

Power hoards itself in the gaps between what democracy promises and what citizens bother to enforce. Charles Edison’s line works because it refuses the comforting idea that “bossism” in city halls is just the price of doing politics at street level. By pairing bosses with dictators, he yanks local government out of its folksy, pothole-and-permits innocence and frames it as the same old struggle: concentrated power versus accountable power. The provocation is deliberate. Nobody wants to imagine their zoning board as a proto-autocracy, but that’s exactly the point: corruption and machine rule thrive when they’re treated as merely “how things get done.”

Edison’s specific intent is to shame complacency. He doesn’t argue that bosses are rare; he argues they are optional. The subtext is harsher: democratic institutions don’t self-correct. They decay in the direction of convenience, patronage, and insider control unless “true believers” keep applying friction - voting, organizing, showing up, demanding records, contesting appointments. Notice he doesn’t invoke laws, prosecutors, or reform commissions as the first line of defense; he invokes citizens. That’s a quiet rebuke to the middle-class habit of outsourcing civic responsibility to “good government” professionals.

Context matters: Edison, a businessman and public figure from the era when urban political machines were still a living memory, is channeling a post-Progressive skepticism. Efficiency can be a virtue in business, but in politics it can become a cover for unaccountable rule. His warning is that democracy isn’t endangered only by dramatic coups; it’s slowly bargained away in local rooms where few people are watching.