Politics & Power Quote by Charley Reese

Reese’s jab lands because it reverses the usual aura of competence that clings to state power. Politicians are supposed to be the adults with the codes; he frames them instead as cognitively outgunned by the very machinery they control. The ellipsis does a lot of work: it mimics the pause before a punchline, inviting the reader to fill in the familiar setup (campaign slogans, solemn speeches) before he snaps to the grim payoff - weapons that outscale the minds authorizing them.

The intent is less anti-technology than anti-complacency. Reese is warning that modern governance has created a lethal mismatch: systems engineered for maximum force paired with decision-making incentives engineered for maximum short-term gain. The subtext isn’t just that politicians are “stupid.” It’s that political thinking is structurally thin: calibrated for optics, election cycles, and factional advantage, not for second- and third-order consequences. When you combine that with nuclear arsenals, sprawling intelligence apparatuses, automated targeting, and bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility, you get a civilization where catastrophe can be produced by procedure.

Contextually, Reese wrote as a skeptical, libertarian-leaning columnist in the long shadow of the Cold War, when “command and control” was both a technical term and a cultural myth. His line punctures that myth. The real target is managerial hubris - the belief that because a state can build something, it can also ethically and wisely steer it. The quote works because it compresses an entire political critique into one asymmetry: complexity keeps scaling up; wisdom doesn’t.