Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s line lands like an incredulous double-take: after the scandals, surveillance, wars, bailouts, botched crises, and bureaucratic impunity that have piled up over “the last few years” and “the last few decades,” how does anyone still talk about the state as a benevolent companion? The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Amazing” isn’t praise; it’s a rebuke disguised as astonishment, a way of framing trust in government not as a reasonable disagreement but as a kind of self-induced amnesia.

The subtext is classic civil-libertarian: government power is not an abstract “we,” it’s an institution with incentives, secrecy, and a monopoly on coercion. Calling faith in it “blind” positions civic trust as religious devotion - emotional, identity-driven, resistant to evidence. That matters because Bovard isn’t arguing policy details here; he’s arguing psychology. He’s diagnosing why voters keep accepting expanded authority even when recent history supplies counterexamples.

Contextually, Bovard has spent decades as a skeptic of federal power (from the drug war to post-9/11 surveillance and executive overreach). The quote reflects a post-Watergate, post-Iraq, post-Patriot Act American mood where distrust is widespread, yet reliance on government solutions persists. The punchline is the pivot to “protections”: he’s not merely anti-government in the cartoon sense; he’s making a constitutionalist case that rights, checks, and due process exist precisely because “friend” is the wrong category. Governments aren’t friends. They’re tools - and tools need guards, especially when they’re held by strangers.