Politics & Power Quote by Bill Moyers

Efficiency is the wrong idol, Moyers suggests, and democracies get in trouble the moment they start worshipping it. The line is built like a concession speech to technocrats: sure, democracy can be slow, messy, procedurally fussy. Then comes the pivot - the “saving grace” isn’t performance, it’s permission. Democracy’s distinguishing feature is not that it always works well, but that it lets you publicly notice when it doesn’t. That’s a low bar in one sense, but it’s also the whole ballgame.

Moyers’ intent is to reframe the usual civic complaint (“government is inefficient”) as a feature rather than a fatal flaw. The subtext is that “efficient” regimes often purchase speed with silence: fewer veto points, fewer messy compromises, fewer dissenting voices, fewer journalists. Democracy’s value is epistemic and moral. It keeps a society capable of self-critique - a feedback loop that authoritarian systems treat as sabotage.

Coming from a journalist, the quote doubles as a defense of the press and the public square. Moyers spent his career arguing that the country’s health depends on scrutiny, not spectacle. In that context, the line is also a warning: if citizens trade accountability for streamlined outcomes, they may end up with a government that looks effective until it fails catastrophically, with no legal or cultural way to name the failure.

The wit is in the paradox: democracy’s “saving grace” is that it institutionalizes complaint. Not cynicism - consent, revised in real time.