Politics & Power Quote by Chester Brown

Brown’s tone is deceptively mild: a plainspoken civic shrug that lands like a quiet indictment. Coming from a cartoonist best known for mining awkwardness, power, and moral compromise in clean, controlled lines, the quote works because it refuses the usual permission structure around politics. He’s not arguing that everyone must be an activist or even well-informed; he’s asserting something more basic and more unsettling: interest is the default setting, apathy is the aberration.

The subtext is a challenge to the cultural pose of being “above it all.” In North American life, political disengagement often masquerades as sophistication (too busy, too cynical, too “both sides”), but Brown frames it as a kind of illiteracy about the rules you’re forced to live under. His phrase “how we run our society” is intentionally non-ideological. It strips politics of partisan theater and returns it to governance: budgets, policing, healthcare, zoning, war. The move is rhetorical judo; if politics is infrastructure, then refusing to care looks less like neutrality and more like letting other people steer.

There’s also an autobiographical edge. Cartoonists operate in the realm of public argument without the formal authority of pundits or politicians; their craft is persuasion by narrative, by framing, by what gets simplified and what gets lingered on. Brown’s “I almost don’t understand” is a creator’s way of naming his own compulsion: to look at systems, to diagram the social machine, to ask who benefits. It’s an invitation, but it’s also a warning that opting out is still a political act - just one with the least control over its consequences.