Politics & Power Quote by Todd Gitlin

Gitlin’s line doesn’t argue policy so much as stage a warning about scale: power that stops being merely partisan and starts feeling planetary. The phrase “the Bush crowd” is doing tactical work. It’s not “the administration” or “the party,” which would grant institutional legitimacy; it’s a “crowd,” a network, a clique, a social formation that spreads through proximity and patronage. Coming from a sociologist, that choice matters. He’s cueing readers to think in terms of elites, pipelines, and capture, not just elections.

“Extend their sway” carries a whiff of empire, but domesticated into managerial language. “Sway” implies influence that can be informal, even cultural, not only legal. Then Gitlin widens the aperture with deliberate excess: “policies of every imaginable variety” and “almost every square foot of earth.” The near-comic overreach isn’t a mistake; it mimics the feeling of the early-2000s moment, when terrorism, war, surveillance, climate, trade, and media all seemed to funnel back to Washington’s choices. Hyperbole becomes a diagnostic tool for a particular political mood: the sense that nothing is local anymore.

The kicker - “the control of the American state is a matter of urgency” - reframes civic disagreement as an emergency of governance. “Control” is blunt, even ominous: it suggests the state as an instrument that can be seized and steered, not a neutral referee. Subtext: if you treat politics as normal while institutions are being occupied and globalized, you arrive too late. Gitlin isn’t offering optimism; he’s trying to compress complacent time into immediate action.