Politics & Power Quote by Eric Alterman

Foreign policy is where democracy goes to die quietly, under a pile of acronyms and urgent warnings about “complexity.” Alterman’s line is less a plea for better civic education than a diagnosis of how the game is rigged: before citizens can even debate what should be done abroad, they have to fight to make it discussable at all.

The intent is confrontational and procedural. “Democratic control” sounds like a principle everyone claims to support, yet Alterman points out the first barrier isn’t winning an argument; it’s getting access to the argument. “Requires a struggle” frames agenda-setting as conflict, not civics. The subtext is that institutions benefiting from insulation - national security bureaucracies, partisan leadership, think-tank ecosystems, and a media cycle drawn to horse races over hearings - have structural incentives to keep foreign policy off the kitchen-table docket unless there’s a war, a scandal, or a catastrophe.

Context matters: Alterman writes in the long post-Vietnam, post-Iraq shadow, where elite consensus has repeatedly outrun public consent. His critique also echoes a broader media argument: if gatekeepers treat foreign policy as technocratic and specialized, public accountability becomes performative, arriving after decisions are locked in. The phrase “force the issue” is doing a lot of work; it implies pressure tactics, organizing, investigative journalism, and sustained attention - not the occasional viral outrage.

Why it works is its blunt inversion of a comforting myth. We like to imagine democracy failing because people don’t care. Alterman suggests people often can’t care, because the system is designed to keep the stakes abstract until the costs are irreversible.