Politics & Power Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal’s joke lands like a martini with a razor blade in it: elegant, funny, and quietly vicious. The line turns on a bleak wish-fulfillment fantasy of democracy as an exclusive club. If the nonvoters are the same people who don’t read newspapers, then the electorate is, in theory, composed of citizens who have at least met the basic job requirement: paying attention. It’s a punchline built from arithmetic, but the real engine is contempt for mass politics and the media’s shrinking role as a shared civic text.

The subtext is less “read the news” than “stop pretending ignorance is a harmless lifestyle choice.” Vidal is needling two American habits at once: bragging about not following politics and treating voting as a badge of virtue regardless of what informs it. He’s also smuggling in an old patrician anxiety: universal suffrage is only as noble as the public’s willingness to do the reading. That discomfort is the point. The line flatters the informed listener while implicating them in a class-coded hierarchy of “serious people” versus the allegedly unfit.

Context matters: Vidal came up in an era when newspapers still set the agenda and when public intellectuals could plausibly imagine a single, literate national conversation. By the late 20th century, that consensus was splintering, and he weaponized the split as comedy. The cynicism isn’t merely snobbery; it’s a diagnosis of a system where disengagement is normalized and then harvested. Vidal’s hope is a joke, but it’s also a warning about what happens when civic participation becomes optional and attention becomes a luxury good.