Politics & Power Quote by Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer’s line lands because it treats American politics less like a civic ritual than a factory on a production schedule: “every two years” as an assembly line, “industry” as the tell. He isn’t primarily scolding voters or even candidates; he’s indicting the media-political complex that profits from permanent combat and then performs surprise when the public emerges cynical. The sentence is built as a trap: first, a relentless catalogue of excess (“virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall”), then the punchline of feigned innocence (“declares itself puzzled”). The irony is surgical. If you monetize rage, you shouldn’t be shocked when the product is mistrust.

The subtext is about incentives. By calling it an “industry,” he collapses the distinction between journalism, campaigns, consultants, and ad-buyers into one machine with one metric: attention. “Fills the airwaves” is deliberately old-media language, but the point scales easily to any platform: saturation coverage makes politics feel inescapable, and the content is overwhelmingly prosecutorial. Character assassination becomes the default grammar because it’s faster than policy and more clickable than nuance. That doesn’t just damage individual “practitioners”; it corrodes the category of “politician” itself into a synonym for fraud.

Context matters: Krauthammer wrote across the era when cable news and campaign advertising turned elections into continuous spectacle, with midterms ensuring the temperature never drops. His intent isn’t to exonerate politicians, but to expose the hypocrisy of institutions that light the match, watch the fire spread, then blame the smoke for choking the room.