Politics & Power Quote by Tom G. Palmer

Palmer is taking a clean shot at one of politics' most seductive shortcuts: turning collections of people into a single, acting creature. When we say "America wants", "the market decided", "immigrants are", or "the Left believes", we smuggle intention and agency into abstractions. It feels clarifying because it gives a messy reality a narrator. Palmer argues it does the opposite. It blurs who actually chose what, who had power, who bore costs, and which institutions made decisions.

The intent is methodological as much as ideological. As an educator with libertarian-adjacent instincts, Palmer is warning against rhetorical moves that justify coercion by pretending a "group" has a unified will. If "society demands" something, dissenters become not just opponents but defects. Group personification turns political conflict into moral hygiene: the body politic must purge what "it" rejects. That lets real actors - legislators, regulators, party leaders, interest groups - hide behind an invented collective subject.

The subtext is also an epistemic critique. Once you grant a group a single mind, you stop asking empirical questions: Which subgroup? Measured how? Under what incentives? Politics becomes psychology-by-metaphor. The phrase "obscures, rather than illuminates" is doing a teacherly kind of shaming: you are not being sophisticated; you are being lazy.

Contextually, this is a pushback against nationalist and collectivist storytelling, but it also applies to contemporary identity and algorithmic discourse, where "communities" and "platforms" get treated as intentional beings. Palmer is asking for a politics that names decision-makers, traces causality, and admits pluralism instead of ventriloquizing it.