Politics & Power Quote by Todd Gitlin

A one-party state is supposed to be the end of politics, the moment when argument gets replaced by administration and dissent is treated as noise. Gitlin’s line flips that premise with a sociologist’s deadpan bite: the absence of real party competition doesn’t eliminate politics, it eliminates the possibility of politics in any meaningful, democratic sense. “Right now” matters. It’s not a timeless lament about human nature; it’s an alarm about a present-tense condition, the sense that the system has slipped from contest into foregone conclusion.

The subtext is less about formal party labels than about monopoly. Gitlin is pointing at what happens when a single governing consensus, coalition, or institutional machine becomes so dominant that elections turn into brand management and policy becomes a negotiation among insiders. In that world, “politics” shrinks to symbolism, procedural skirmishes, and culture-war theater - activity that looks busy but can’t deliver the core democratic function: real choices with real consequences.

Contextually, Gitlin’s career runs through the New Left, media criticism, and the slow professionalization of activism. He’s wary of how mass media rewards spectacle over substance and how institutions absorb insurgency. The quote reads like a compressed diagnosis of late-stage legitimacy: when opposition is structurally weak or delegitimized, power doesn’t need to persuade, only to perpetuate itself. It’s a warning that “unity” can be another name for foreclosure - the quiet authoritarianism of inevitability.