Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s line is a scolding disguised as a shrug. “It is hard to know how many people do” opens with faux modesty, a nod to uncertainty that quickly pivots into an accusation: Americans have become “docile towards the rulers.” The word choice is doing the heavy lifting. “Docile” is what you say about domesticated animals, not citizens; “rulers” is what you call regimes, not elected officials. In a single phrase, he reframes the U.S. from a contested democracy into a soft authoritarian arrangement where compliance has become the default civic posture.

The comparison to “our forefathers” is not nostalgia so much as a pressure tactic. It invokes a mythic baseline of revolutionary courage, then weaponizes it against the present. Bovard’s intent isn’t to offer a measured survey of public attitudes; it’s to shame complacency and re-ignite suspicion toward state power. The subtext is that liberty erodes less through dramatic crackdowns than through comfort, habituation, and the slow normalization of being managed.

Contextually, this fits Bovard’s long-running project as a libertarian critic of government overreach: the surveillance state, war powers, bureaucracy, emergency rationales that never expire. “Nowadays” signals a post-9/11 sensibility, when security language became a civic solvent, dissolving resistance by presenting trade-offs as maturity. The sting is that he doesn’t blame “the rulers” alone; he indicts the ruled for letting it happen, suggesting the real crisis is cultural: a waning appetite for conflict in defense of freedom.