Life & Wisdom Quote by Alan Coren

Democracy, in Coren's hands, isn’t a noble mechanism so much as a consumer ritual: you pick from the menu after the sales pitch has already rewritten your appetite. The line lands because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. Dictatorships are supposed to be about coercion; democracies, consent. Coren suggests the coercion just got smarter. The dictator no longer needs to silence you if he can pre-load your desires, then invite you to “choose” him as the instrument of their fulfillment.

The wording is doing most of the work. “Consists of” is brutally reductionist, as if all the parades of civic virtue can be collapsed into a single shady transaction. “Choosing your dictators” is the punch: it drags the language of tyranny into the polling booth, staining the act of voting with complicity. Then comes the sly turn: “after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.” Coren sketches a psychological loop where the voter’s preferences are ventriloquized back at them. Not just pandering, but preference formation: the politician supplies the script, the public supplies the conviction.

Context matters here: Coren wrote in a Britain steeped in tabloid mood-setting, media-trained leaders, and a late-20th-century politics increasingly fluent in focus groups and message discipline. It’s satire with teeth, but not nihilism. The jab isn’t that democracy is identical to dictatorship; it’s that democracy can be hollowed out when persuasion becomes manufacturing, when politics stops arguing with citizens and starts impersonating them.