Politics & Power Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s line lands like a dinner bell disguised as a civics lesson: government growth isn’t framed as ideology or public need, but as appetite. By calling the “expansion of federal activity” a “form of eating,” he yanks the debate out of policy abstraction and into animal impulse. It’s not that politicians occasionally overreach; it’s that expansion is how they metabolize relevance. Bureaucracy becomes calories.

The specific intent is classic Buckley: to delegitimize the default assumption that more federal action equals moral progress or pragmatic problem-solving. He wants the reader to feel that new programs, agencies, and regulations are not neutral tools but self-serving nourishment for the political class. The metaphor does heavy lifting because it implies inevitability: you don’t negotiate with hunger; you manage it or you get consumed.

Subtext: the state is not an impartial referee but an organism that seeks to grow, and politicians are its beneficiaries and enzymes. “Eating” also hints at predation. Who gets eaten? Taxpayers, local institutions, civil society, the private sector - anyone whose autonomy is converted into resources and authority in Washington.

Context matters. Buckley, as the defining editorial force of postwar American conservatism, spent decades arguing that liberalism’s administrative state created permanent incentives for centralization. This quip compresses that worldview into something memorable and faintly insulting, using wit as a weapon: it’s easier to mock an appetite than to refute a spreadsheet. The genius - and the provocation - is that it treats power not as a lofty calling but as a human craving dressed up in official language.