Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Foster Bennett

Bennett is puncturing one of politics' favorite self-soothing myths: that every blunder must be a plot. The line swings like a gavel against the cable-news instinct to treat government as a chessboard staffed by grandmasters. By invoking Machiavelli, he names the temptingly elegant explanation - cold strategy, hidden hands, ruthless competence. Then he refuses it. “Almost every time” is the tell: not a cute insult, but a rule of thumb learned the hard way by someone who watched institutions from the inside.

The specific intent is diagnostic. Bennett is warning colleagues, journalists, and voters against overfitting reality to intrigue. The simplest explanation for a policy fiasco is often not malevolence but mediocrity: rushed staff work, ego, bureaucratic inertia, incentives that reward speed over rigor, and the quiet fact that many decision-makers are unprepared for the complexity they manage. It’s a politician’s version of Hanlon’s razor, sharpened for public life.

The subtext carries a second, darker implication: stupidity is not evenly distributed; it’s produced. Systems that prize loyalty over expertise, punish dissent, and confuse certainty with competence manufacture predictable errors. When Bennett says stupidity “trumps” Machiavelli, he’s also saying that the modern state is less a conspiracy machine than a miscommunication engine - and that citizens should fear not only villains, but amateurs with authority.

Contextually, coming from a mid-20th-century American political figure, the line reads as backlash against the paranoid style that surged through Cold War suspicion and later media ecosystems: an insistence that there must be a mastermind. Bennett’s twist is more unsettling: sometimes no one is steering.