Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge’s line lands like a cold splash on the face of power: fear is not just an emotion in politics, it’s a governing strategy with a built-in expiration date. Coming from a poet who lived through the French Revolution’s arc from liberation to Terror to Napoleon, the warning isn’t abstract. It’s the pattern he watched in real time: regimes and movements that promise safety first end up narrowing the world until they can’t breathe.

The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Begins” and “ends” make politics feel less like a debate and more like a plot. Fear is the inciting incident; failure is the predictable finale. Coleridge isn’t claiming fear never motivates action. He’s arguing that fear is a bad architect. It builds quickly, defensively, with short-term logic: clamp down, scapegoat, overreach. That produces brittle institutions and leaders addicted to emergency, always needing a new threat to justify the last crackdown. The system becomes reactive, not imaginative.

The subtext is also moral, but not pious. Fear-based politics corrodes legitimacy. When a government rules by panic, it trains citizens to distrust one another, then acts surprised when social cohesion collapses. It can win the next vote or survive the next crisis, but it can’t generate durable consent. Coleridge’s poet’s insight is structural: fear makes politics smaller than the problems it claims to solve, and the gap between promised security and lived reality is where failure moves in.