Politics & Power Quote by John Rawls

Rawls is diagnosing a democracy that has been quietly converted into a fundraising machine, where public reasoning becomes an after-hours hobby and governing becomes a side hustle. The line lands because it doesn’t moralize about “corruption” in the melodramatic sense; it describes a structural takeover. If campaigns require constant capital infusion, then politicians don’t merely become tempted by donors - they become operationally dependent on them. The system doesn’t fail in a blaze; it stalls, one call-time block at a time.

The phrasing matters. “Simply unable to function” is Rawls at his most clinical and damning: not “imperfect,” not “biased,” but incapacitated. Then “deliberative powers” points to his deeper preoccupation: legitimacy. In Rawls’s world, a just society isn’t held together by vibes or even outcomes, but by procedures that citizens can recognize as fair. Deliberation is the moral engine of liberal democracy, the place where reasons are traded, not favors. If that engine is “paralyzed,” legitimacy doesn’t just erode - it becomes performative, a ritual masking capture.

Contextually, this sits squarely in late-20th-century anxiety about the growing professionalization of politics: permanent campaigns, television advertising, the escalation of costs, and the corresponding rise of money as the gatekeeper of attention. Rawls’s subtext is blunt: when access is purchased, equality becomes a constitutional fiction. Campaign finance isn’t a policy sidebar; it’s a basic-structure problem that quietly decides which voices count as “public” in the first place.