Creativity Quote by George Montgomery

It lands like a dirty joke and then twists the knife: “Democracy in China is like Viagra” sets you up for a punchline about performance, not principle. Viagra is a marketed promise of potency; it doesn’t create intimacy or consent, it engineers an effect. By yoking that to “democracy,” Montgomery implies a political system that can simulate vigor without granting genuine agency. The sting is in the abrupt second clause: “no such thing as free elections.” The metaphor stops being playful and becomes a flat assertion that the core mechanism of democratic legitimacy is absent.

The intent reads less like policy critique than cultural provocation, the kind an artist might use to puncture euphemisms and force an audience to admit what they already suspect. The subtext is about optics: modern states can stage the look of participation - consultative bodies, managed local votes, carefully curated “public opinion” - while keeping outcomes pre-decided. Viagra becomes shorthand for an externally induced display: impressive on the surface, dependent on control, and ultimately transactional.

Context matters because the line trades on a Western vernacular where “China” often stands for authoritarian efficiency plus global integration. Dropping a consumer-drug reference into geopolitics also signals the era’s media logic: politics as spectacle, critique as one-liner. It’s cynical, yes, and deliberately so. The joke isn’t only that elections aren’t free; it’s that the performance of freedom is treated as sufficient, as long as it “works” for stability, markets, and the audience’s short attention span.