Politics & Power Quote by Will Rogers

Rogers lands the joke like a rope trick: casual, homespun, and then suddenly a little vicious. He frames Democrats as cannibals, forced into self-consumption, a party so factional it survives by devouring its own. Then he pivots to Republicans, who don’t even need the messiness of internal conflict because they can feed off the opposition’s chaos. The laugh comes from the asymmetry. Democrats are portrayed as tragically self-destructive; Republicans as opportunistically disciplined. It’s not “both sides are bad” so much as “one side can’t stop stepping on rakes, and the other side has learned to sell the bruises.”

The subtext is classic Rogers: he’s not doing ideology, he’s doing ecosystems. Politics isn’t a battle of principles; it’s a food chain. “Live off” is the operative phrase. It implies parasitism and dependence, suggesting that parties are less independent moral projects than mutually sustaining organisms, each needing the other’s failures to stay nourished.

Context sharpens the bite. Rogers worked in an era when the Democratic coalition was famously unwieldy and regionally split, while the Republican brand often benefited from painting Democrats as incompetent stewards. As an entertainer in the early mass-media age, he turns complexity into a single, memorable image you can repeat at the bar or in a newspaper column. The intent isn’t to adjudicate policy; it’s to puncture pieties about party virtue and expose politics as performance, where winning often means mastering the optics of the other side’s self-inflicted wounds.