Politics & Power Quote by Lee H. Hamilton

“For decades” is doing quiet but crucial work here: Hamilton isn’t diagnosing a single policy failure so much as indicting a long, bipartisan habit. By choosing “addiction,” he yanks energy out of the technocratic realm and into the language of compulsion and denial. Addiction implies a substance that once felt useful, even necessary, but now governs the user’s choices. It’s a moral metaphor with policy teeth: if the public is addicted, then price spikes, foreign entanglements, and climate tradeoffs aren’t isolated shocks - they’re withdrawal symptoms from a dependency we keep feeding.

The phrasing also spreads responsibility widely. “The American people” doesn’t let Washington alone take the fall, even though Washington built the incentives: highway systems, zoning that requires driving, subsidies, and a political culture that treats cheap gasoline like a birthright. Hamilton’s intent is to make that shared culpability legible. If voters see themselves as beneficiaries of the status quo, then leaders can justify hard transitions as recovery rather than punishment.

Context matters: Hamilton’s career runs through the post-embargo era, the Gulf War decades, 9/11’s energy-security anxieties, and the long slow politicization of climate. “Addiction” compresses those eras into one story: repeated crises, repeated vows to change, repeated relapse. The subtext is a warning about the next crisis. If dependency is structural, then the only “solution” is not a clever tweak but a painful reordering of infrastructure, consumption, and expectations - the kind of politics that demands a narrative strong enough to compete with convenience.