Politics & Power Quote by Michele Bachmann

Bachmann’s line is engineered to sound like a reboot of 1776, not a campaign stump. The key move is the phrase “we the people,” a constitutional shibboleth that lets her borrow the founding’s moral authority while positioning her audience as the rightful owners of the state. “Stand for a moment” frames the campaign as a historic hinge-point; it’s not just a vote, it’s an emergency.

The subtext is insurgency without the messiness of naming enemies. She doesn’t say which policies, agencies, or laws “took away” liberty; the vagueness is the point. “Government that has gotten too big and spends too much” fuses two anxieties - cultural control and fiscal irresponsibility - into one villain. That bundling widens the tent: libertarians hear surveillance and regulation, deficit hawks hear debt, social conservatives can supply their own list of moral grievances.

“Independence from a government” is the most telling twist. Independence is normally from an empire, not your own institutions, so the sentence quietly recasts Washington as an occupying force and ordinary Americans as a kind of internal colony. It’s Tea Party rhetoric at full voltage, written in the wake of the Obama-era stimulus, health-care overhaul fights, and a broader suspicion that elites were remaking the country without consent.

As a piece of political language, it works because it offers a clean emotional trade: trade complexity for clarity, policy details for identity, and ordinary partisan disagreement for a righteous reclamation story. The campaign becomes a referendum on belonging.