Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

A small demolition job disguised as a pastoral metaphor, Bovard’s line ridicules the way citizens bargain away adulthood for rescue. “Save them” isn’t framed as a policy preference; it’s a psychological posture. He’s not arguing about which programs work, he’s sneering at the hunger for a caretaker-state and the self-pity that often accompanies it. The punch lands in the phrase “dignified search”: he implies the electorate wants to feel noble while shopping for someone to manage their lives, a kind of moral cosplay where dependence can still be worn as virtue.

“Shepherd in chief” is the key move. It swaps the constitutional image of a president (administrator, representative, executive) for a religious one (guardian, moral authority, keeper of a flock). That metaphor makes the power dynamic embarrassingly clear: if voters are sheep, the leader they’re selecting is licensed to herd, not just to govern. Bovard’s subtext is that modern politics thrives on this mutual corruption: politicians campaign as saviors because voters reward the performance, and voters seek saviors because responsibility is exhausting and uncertainty feels like personal failure.

Contextually, it fits Bovard’s libertarian-leaning critique of paternalism and emergency politics: crises, real or manufactured, become pretexts for expanded authority, and the public learns to ask first for protection rather than limits. His cynicism is strategic. By mocking the “dignified” fantasy, he tries to make dependence socially unfashionable, forcing the reader to confront a harder question than “Who will fix this?”: “What am I willing to surrender to feel safe?”