Leadership Quote by Chris Patten

Democracy, Patten implies, is at its most honest when it admits the people we would rather edit out. The sting of “even the jerks” is doing real work: it drags representation down from civics-class abstraction into the messy reality of elections, where voters don’t arrive pre-sanitized and public office isn’t a moral prize. Patten’s line is a pressure test for liberal self-image. If you only believe in representation when the represented are admirable, you don’t believe in representation; you believe in a curated audience.

The intent is both pragmatic and pointedly defensive of the system. As a longtime British Conservative, former party chair, and last governor of Hong Kong, Patten spent a career inside institutions that take heat from both directions: elites accused of ignoring “ordinary people,” and reformers tempted to tighten the circle of legitimacy. The joke lowers the temperature while sharpening the argument: a democracy that starts disqualifying citizens for being obnoxious, ill-informed, or ideologically distasteful is already sliding toward managerial rule.

Subtext: you don’t get to outsource the consequences of pluralism. “Jerks” covers the whole uncomfortable spectrum: demagogues, cranks, conspiracists, bigots, perennial contrarians. Patten isn’t celebrating them; he’s warning that the cost of political equality is tolerating participation you find irritating, even threatening. The line also needles the moral vanity of sophisticated politics: the temptation to treat disagreement as pathology.

It works because it refuses the flattering version of democracy. No soaring talk of “the people,” just the unglamorous fact that “the people” includes the guy you’d mute at dinner.