Politics & Power Quote by Stephen Harper

Harper’s line is a cold-water reminder that parliamentary drama is less about righteous crusades than arithmetic and bruised relationships. In a Westminster system, governments rarely fall because the public wakes up enlightened; they fall because enough MPs decide the governing party has become impossible to live with. The verb “alienates” is doing the real work here. It frames collapse as a failure of coalition-management, not a moral verdict. The government doesn’t get toppled by a single opponent’s brilliance, but by accumulating irritations across factions until even natural allies start voting like enemies.

The specific intent is both tactical and disciplining. It signals to caucus members and rival parties alike that power is relational: keep people close, keep them fed, keep them consulted. Alienation is political malpractice. That’s a very Harper move - managerial, unsentimental, oriented toward mechanics rather than spectacle. He’s stripping the romance out of “bringing down” a government and replacing it with a procedural truth: confidence is a social contract that can be revoked.

Subtextually, the quote also narrows the field of legitimate change. It implies that disruption isn’t born from protest movements or public pressure directly, but from elites inside the chamber recalculating their interests. If you want a government to fall, you don’t just rally outside; you cultivate fractures inside.

Context matters: Harper came up in an era of minority governments and tight votes in Canada, where survival depends on constant negotiation and where arrogance can turn a manageable opposition into a coordinated threat. The line reads like a warning from someone who believes politics is mostly the art of not making enemies you don’t need.