Life & Wisdom Quote by Gerald F. Lieberman

Lieberman’s line lands like a trapdoor under a familiar civic ritual. The verb choice is the tell: elections aren’t “imperfect” or “corrupted,” they’re “held to delude.” That’s a claim about design, not decay. It turns the ballot from a tool of accountability into stagecraft, a performance that converts frustration into a manageable sense of agency. You don’t have to be satisfied with the system if you can be convinced you’re already inside it.

The subtext is less “don’t vote” than “watch what voting is asked to substitute for.” Elections become a pressure valve: a scheduled moment when anger is ritualized, quantified, then safely reset for another cycle. The populace is “participating,” but only in the narrowest, most administratively convenient way - selecting among pre-cleared options while deeper decisions remain insulated in bureaucracy, money, courts, media ecosystems, and unelected networks of expertise.

What makes the sentence work is its blunt reduction of a sacred democratic noun into a verb of manipulation. It’s cynical, yes, but also diagnostic: it echoes a long modern suspicion that legitimacy is manufactured through consent rituals, that “choice” can be curated as tightly as advertising. Read in contemporary context - low trust, high polarization, big-donor influence, algorithmic persuasion - the quote hits because it mirrors a lived feeling: being invited to participate right up to the point where participation might actually redistribute power.