Politics & Power Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal’s joke lands with the clean cruelty of a well-aimed dart: it takes two depressing statistics and turns them into a wish that the same citizens occupy both categories, as if democracy would be safer with a smaller electorate. The laugh comes from the taboo he’s willing to violate. In a civic religion that treats voting as sacred, Vidal treats it as a dangerous privilege when paired with ignorance.

The line is engineered to provoke two audiences at once. For the self-styled informed reader, it flatters: you read, you vote, you’re not part of the problem. For everyone else, it’s a slap, implying that political participation without basic literacy (or at least attentiveness) is not empowerment but sabotage. Vidal isn’t really endorsing disenfranchisement so much as mocking the romantic story Americans tell themselves about the wisdom of “the people.” His subtext is patrician and theatrical: mass democracy sounds noble until you remember how little time, education, or incentive most people have to follow public life.

Context matters: Vidal spent decades skewering American power, media, and the mythmaking that props them up. Mid-century and late-20th-century politics were awash in television optics, machine campaigning, and low-information persuasion. “Never read a newspaper” isn’t just about print; it’s shorthand for not having a shared factual baseline. The sting is that Vidal’s quip still works today, with newspapers swapped for feeds and voting shaped less by deliberation than by vibes, grievance, and algorithmic outrage.