Politics & Power Quote by Bob Black

The line lands like a heckle from the back row: not a plea to “participate,” but a dare to stop pretending the show is interactive. Bob Black’s intent isn’t to shame nonvoters; it’s to flip the shame onto the system that treats citizenship as a chore chart. By saying people “aren’t as stupid as the politicians think,” he assumes a basic, street-level intelligence that elites misread as apathy. The punch is that disengagement isn’t ignorance - it’s recognition.

“Laughing off our ‘civic duty’” is doing a lot of work. The scare quotes frame duty as a manufactured moral pressure, the kind of language that turns obedience into virtue. Black’s subtext is anarchist: voting is less a right than a ritual that launders legitimacy. If you can be scolded into the booth, you can be governed without being heard. The phrase “compulsory constituent” is the real indictment. It suggests politics as a one-way relationship where the public’s job is to periodically certify rulers, not meaningfully steer outcomes. “Constituent” becomes a role assigned, not an identity chosen.

Context matters: this is a late-20th-century activist critique shaped by disillusionment with party politics, bureaucratic drift, and the sense that elections offer managed choices. It’s also a strategy. Refusing the script - even through mockery - is framed as a form of withdrawal from consent. Black isn’t betting on better candidates; he’s betting that legitimacy is the fragile part of the machine.