Politics & Power Quote by Glenn Danzig

Danzig’s line lands like a punk riff: simple, blunt, and designed to provoke the room into choosing sides before he’s even finished the sentence. The hook is the “being played” framing, which borrows from the language of scams and stagecraft. It casts voters not as mistaken but as manipulated - and it flatters the speaker (and listener) with the promise of seeing through it.

The pivot, though, is where the real intent shows: “but more so by the Democratic Party.” That’s not a balanced critique of a two-party system; it’s a pointed accusation aimed at the side many artists are assumed to orbit. Coming from a musician with a contrarian brand, it reads as identity-making as much as analysis: I’m not part of your cultural coalition. The subtext is less about policy than about gatekeeping and conformity - a suspicion that “the Democrats” manage dissent by absorbing it, branding it, and keeping alternatives from gaining oxygen.

Context matters. In the U.S., both parties have structural incentives to keep third parties marginal: ballot access rules, debate thresholds, fundraising networks, and media habits that treat “viable” as synonymous with “major-party.” Danzig compresses that whole apparatus into a street-level grievance, then assigns motive (“does not want another party in there”) to make the system feel intentional, not incidental.

It works because it’s emotionally legible: frustration at capture, boredom with scripted politics, and the old rock impulse to spit at the stage - even if you’re already on it.