Politics & Power Quote by Dick Morris

“Spontaneous combustion of grassroots politics” is deliberately paradoxical: it frames popular organizing as both organic (“grassroots”) and volatile (“combustion”), as if civic participation were less a patient coalition-building project than a chemical reaction waiting for a spark. Dick Morris, a seasoned political operator turned author and commentator, isn’t just forecasting a trend; he’s selling a model of power that flatters the audience. The phrase invites readers to imagine themselves not as foot soldiers but as accelerants.

The intent is tactical. “Spontaneous” implies leaderless legitimacy and moral purity, sidestepping the messy reality that “spontaneous” movements usually have infrastructure, funding, media oxygen, and skilled narrative management. By borrowing the language of disaster and ignition, Morris also normalizes disruption as strategy. Politics becomes a controlled burn: destructive to existing institutions, cleansing for the movement’s aims.

The subtext is a critique of traditional party machinery and elite gatekeeping, but it’s also an argument for a new kind of elite influence: the strategist who knows how to trigger cascades. In the late-20th/early-21st-century media ecosystem Morris helped inhabit, outrage travels faster than policy, and “combustion” is practically a growth hack. The line anticipates a politics built around rapid mobilization, viral frames, and episodic eruptions rather than deliberation.

It works because it turns anxiety into destiny. If the future is combustion, then escalation feels less like a choice and more like weather: prepare for it, harness it, or get burned.