Politics & Power Quote by John Perry Barlow

To call politics “sullying” is to frame civic life as a moral hazard, not a duty. John Perry Barlow isn’t just confessing disengagement; he’s performing a particular strain of late-20th-century American libertarian disappointment, where institutions are assumed to be grubby machines that contaminate anyone who touches them. The line’s power sits in its balance of exhaustion and superiority: “generally speaking” softens the claim into a worldly shrug, while “to such a degree” escalates it into near-spiritual pollution. The payoff is brutal cost-benefit accounting: the product of political participation is so degraded that it can’t repay the price of proximity.

Subtext: purity. Barlow implies an ethical self that must be protected from compromise, as if the primary political question is not what changes, but what it does to you. That’s emotionally persuasive in a culture that romanticizes the unbought, the outsider, the person who refuses to be “part of the system.” It also smuggles in a convenient alibi: if politics is inherently dirty, abstention becomes principled rather than passive.

Context matters. Barlow came of age amid Vietnam-era cynicism, Watergate’s institutional rot, and the Reagan-era consolidation of money-and-media politics. Later, as a cyber-libertarian voice (and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), he helped push the idea that the internet could route around the state. This sentence reads like an early draft of that credo: why wrestle in the mud when you can build a world that doesn’t need the arena? The sting is that democracy, unlike utopia, doesn’t run on cleanliness; it runs on negotiated mess.