Politics & Power Quote by Lily Tomlin

The joke lands because it flatters you and indicts you in the same breath. Lily Tomlin starts with a cozy statistic - 98 percent of Americans as decent, hardworking, honest - a line that sounds like diner talk and campaign rhetoric. It’s warm, reassuring, and crucially, collective: you’re invited into the virtuous majority. Then she snaps the trap shut. The “lousy two percent” aren’t just bad apples; they’re the ones “that get all the publicity,” meaning they dominate the story we tell about ourselves. The punchline - “But then, we elected them” - flips the audience from spectator to accomplice. The problem isn’t only the elites; it’s the machinery of attention and the public’s willingness to outsource responsibility.

Tomlin’s intent is less to moralize than to puncture a common coping strategy: pretending politics is something done by “them” to “us.” The subtext is that democracy doesn’t fail solely because of corruption; it fails because good people treat civic life like background noise until scandal makes it entertainment. “Publicity” is doing a lot of work here, hinting at media incentives, celebrity politicians, and the way outrage crowds out competence.

Context matters: Tomlin comes out of a late-20th-century American comedy tradition where the stage became a safe place to say the unsafe thing about power. As an actress and comic, she’s not issuing a policy brief; she’s offering a cultural diagnosis in one line: the electorate keeps buying the product it claims to hate.