Politics & Power Quote by Edward S. Herman

War doesn’t begin on the battlefield; it begins in the boardroom and the briefing room, where “consent” is treated less like public judgment than a resource to be extracted. Herman’s line is coldly procedural on purpose. “If” isn’t a moral hypothetical so much as a recurring pattern: when economic power and political authority align, the hardest part of war is no longer strategy but sales.

The phrase “business community and political elite” is doing quiet, accusatory work. It refuses the comforting idea that wars are purely about national security or popular passion. Herman collapses the distance between profit, policy, and propaganda, implying a shared ecosystem where defense contracts, geopolitical access, electoral advantage, and media narratives reinforce one another. “Want to go to war” is bluntly voluntarist: war isn’t framed as tragic necessity but as a chosen instrument.

Then comes the most corrosive word: “easy.” Herman’s subtext is that “domestic consent” is not the obstacle democratic mythology claims it is. It can be manufactured through agenda-setting and repetition: saturate the public sphere with official sources, narrow the range of “serious” debate, elevate fear, and turn skepticism into disloyalty. Consent, in this view, is mobilized the way logistics are mobilized: quickly, at scale, with institutional muscle.

Context matters: Herman is a foundational critic of U.S. media and power, best known (with Noam Chomsky) for arguing that mass media often “manufactures consent” for elite projects, especially foreign interventions. The intent isn’t to deny public agency; it’s to warn how routinely it’s managed when the incentives to fight line up.