Politics & Power Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line is a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the comfortable living room of civic piety: it forces you to admit that “the people” are not automatically wise and “the elite” are not automatically virtuous. The joke hinges on a grim symmetry. Democracy, in his framing, doesn’t solve the problem of bad rule; it just changes the casting call. Instead of a small circle of insiders selecting their own, you get a mass electorate selecting whoever can survive the attention economy of politics: charisma, slogans, tribal loyalty, and, yes, ignorance.

The subtext is pure Shaw: contempt for complacency disguised as common sense. Calling voters “the incompetent many” is not simply snobbery; it’s a dare. If democracy can be steered by incompetence, then democratic outcomes are as much a referendum on education, media, and civic culture as they are on policy. Shaw is implying that democracy isn’t a moral achievement you inherit; it’s a skill you maintain, and it decays when citizens are treated as an audience rather than participants.

Context matters. Shaw came up in late-Victorian and early 20th-century Britain, watching franchise expansion collide with party machines, patronage, empire politics, and the rising professionalization of persuasion. As a dramatist and public contrarian, he understood performance: elections reward the best actors in a system built on attention and resentment. The sting isn’t “democracy is bad.” It’s that every system manufactures its own mediocrity, and democracy’s version is merely more honest about who’s doing the choosing.