Politics & Power Quote by Auberon Herbert

Herbert’s line lands like a polite Victorian smile with a stiletto behind it: politics, he suggests, is less the art of compromise than the science of organized resentment. The phrasing is almost bureaucratically calm - “mainly consists” - which is exactly the trick. By underplaying the accusation, he makes it feel like a sober description of a job title, not a rant. That restraint sharpens the cynicism.

The intent is not merely to scold individual politicians but to indict the mechanism of mass governance itself. Herbert, a classical liberal and anti-statist thinker, is writing in an age when the British state is expanding its reach: public schooling, social reforms, a swelling administrative apparatus, and an increasingly mobilized electorate. His worry is that once politics becomes the primary route to “please and satisfy” a bloc, coercion is no longer an occasional emergency tool; it becomes the everyday currency of legitimacy.

The subtext is a bleak theory of incentives. In a divided nation, “pleasing” one side often requires using state power to override the preferences of another - taxation, regulation, conscription, moral legislation. Herbert frames that not as tragic necessity but as the politician’s career ladder: you advance by assembling a coalition that can impose costs on outsiders while calling it the public good. The quote also smuggles in a warning about moral laundering: compulsion feels cleaner when it’s performed by ballot, not bayonet.

What makes it work is its symmetrical structure - one part, the other part - which denies the reader an easy hero. Everyone is a potential majority, everyone a future minority, and politics becomes a rotating machine for taking turns being forced.