"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner"
About this Quote
Democracy, Bovard suggests, is where power learns to smile. The line lands because it takes the warm, civic-grade word and drags it back to biology: appetites, numbers, and the brutal arithmetic of who gets eaten. Two wolves and a sheep can hold a perfectly orderly vote; the procedure is intact, the outcome is predation. That is the point. He is not mocking elections as such, he is mocking the lazy assumption that counting preferences automatically produces justice.
The subtext is classical liberal and suspicious of the “majority” as a moral solvent. Bovard’s wolves aren’t just voters; they’re any organized interest with the numbers, the narrative, or the machinery to make their hunger look legitimate. The sheep stands in for minorities, dissidents, or the merely outnumbered - people whose rights become negotiable when politics is treated as a blank check. The joke works because it’s a parable with teeth: it compresses an entire critique of majoritarianism into an image you can’t unsee.
Context matters here. Bovard has spent a career in libertarian-adjacent skepticism toward government overreach, surveillance, and bipartisan expansions of state power. Read that way, the line isn’t a civics lesson; it’s an indictment of democratic romanticism, especially the kind that confuses “the will of the people” with the will of whoever can assemble 51 percent. The missing clause - “something more” - quietly gestures toward constitutional limits, individual rights, and institutional friction: not as bureaucratic nuisances, but as the only things standing between a vote and a meal.
The subtext is classical liberal and suspicious of the “majority” as a moral solvent. Bovard’s wolves aren’t just voters; they’re any organized interest with the numbers, the narrative, or the machinery to make their hunger look legitimate. The sheep stands in for minorities, dissidents, or the merely outnumbered - people whose rights become negotiable when politics is treated as a blank check. The joke works because it’s a parable with teeth: it compresses an entire critique of majoritarianism into an image you can’t unsee.
Context matters here. Bovard has spent a career in libertarian-adjacent skepticism toward government overreach, surveillance, and bipartisan expansions of state power. Read that way, the line isn’t a civics lesson; it’s an indictment of democratic romanticism, especially the kind that confuses “the will of the people” with the will of whoever can assemble 51 percent. The missing clause - “something more” - quietly gestures toward constitutional limits, individual rights, and institutional friction: not as bureaucratic nuisances, but as the only things standing between a vote and a meal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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