Politics & Power Quote by Lewis H. Lapham

Politics, Lapham reminds us, is less a noble chess match than a triage ward: choices made under pressure, with incomplete information, and with consequences that land on real bodies. The sting of his line is in its refusal to grant politics the alibi we like to offer it - that the messiness is an unfortunate detour from an otherwise virtuous project. For Lapham, the mess is the project. The sentence is built like a trap: it begins with a seemingly neutral question and then tightens the screws with a blunt inventory - imperfect, unjust, deadly. Each adjective escalates the moral temperature, moving from pragmatic disappointment to ethical failure to mortality.

As an editor and longtime cultural critic, Lapham is writing against the intoxicating language of campaigns and the self-congratulating myths of governance. His subtext is that political actors (and the publics that reward them) launder violence through procedure. We call it policy, strategy, national interest; he calls it what it often is: a decision that harms someone, sometimes fatally, and then gets archived as necessity.

The intent isn’t nihilism so much as inoculation. By foregrounding injustice and death, Lapham pushes readers to stop treating politics as a realm where moral compromise is exceptional. If politics reliably produces casualties, then the ethical burden shifts: not to fantasize about purity, but to demand accountability, to name trade-offs honestly, and to notice who gets volunteered as the cost of doing business.