Politics & Power Quote by Jeff Greenfield

Politics runs less on master plans than on misfires, fatigue, and the slow entropy of human attention. Jeff Greenfield’s line is a rebuke to the comforting fiction that someone, somewhere, is always in charge. Conspiracy thinking flatters the believer: if outcomes are engineered, then the world is legible, and villains are at least competent. Greenfield replaces that neat narrative with a messier, more plausible engine of history: overworked staffers, overloaded calendars, bad timing, stray remarks that metastasize, and opponents too tired to keep fighting.

The intent is journalistic, not mystical. It’s a corrective aimed at readers trained by scandals and thrillers to look for the hidden hand behind every pivot. Greenfield is reminding us that institutions are often reactive systems with limited bandwidth. Policy “breakthroughs” can be what happens when one side misses a deadline, when the news cycle moves on, when a leader punts a decision because it’s late and the plane is leaving. Exhaustion isn’t just personal; it’s structural. Bureaucracies grind down ambition, coalitions fray, outrage fades, and the path of least resistance starts looking like destiny.

The subtext has bite: blaming conspiracies can be an alibi. It lets politicians dodge accountability (“forces beyond our control”) and lets citizens outsource agency (“nothing we do matters”). Greenfield’s cynicism is oddly bracing. If accidents and fatigue shape outcomes, then vigilance, competence, and persistence matter more than decoding plots. The real drama isn’t a secret cabal; it’s the banal machinery of governance slipping, stalling, and occasionally, by sheer weariness, giving way.