"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes"
About this Quote
Frankfurter’s line lands like a judicial aside that’s too blunt to be docketed: the visible pageantry of Washington is not where decisions coagulate. Coming from a Supreme Court justice, it carries an insinuation that’s sharper than a garden-variety “deep state” gripe. He’s pointing to the structural fact that democratic theater runs on backstage labor: committee chairs, agency lawyers, industry lobbyists, congressional staff, party fixers, and the permanent bureaucracy that outlasts elections. Power, in this telling, is less a spotlight than an ecosystem.
The intent is warning, not melodrama. Frankfurter was a New Deal-era institutionalist who believed deeply in restraint and process, yet he was also intimate with how policy is actually made. His subtext: accountability is perpetually slipping its leash. Voters can name presidents and senators; they can’t easily name the drafter of the regulation, the counsel who shaped the brief, or the donor network that pre-negotiated the “choices” on offer. The invisibility isn’t paranormal, it’s procedural.
Context matters because Frankfurter lived through the expansion of the administrative state, the rise of professionalized expertise, and the wartime-national-security machinery that normalized secrecy. His phrase “behind the scenes” fuses two anxieties: that technocracy can become self-justifying, and that moneyed access can masquerade as mere “consultation.” The quote works because it refuses the comforting civics-book premise that power is where cameras are. It suggests the real contest in Washington is over who gets to write the first draft of reality.
The intent is warning, not melodrama. Frankfurter was a New Deal-era institutionalist who believed deeply in restraint and process, yet he was also intimate with how policy is actually made. His subtext: accountability is perpetually slipping its leash. Voters can name presidents and senators; they can’t easily name the drafter of the regulation, the counsel who shaped the brief, or the donor network that pre-negotiated the “choices” on offer. The invisibility isn’t paranormal, it’s procedural.
Context matters because Frankfurter lived through the expansion of the administrative state, the rise of professionalized expertise, and the wartime-national-security machinery that normalized secrecy. His phrase “behind the scenes” fuses two anxieties: that technocracy can become self-justifying, and that moneyed access can masquerade as mere “consultation.” The quote works because it refuses the comforting civics-book premise that power is where cameras are. It suggests the real contest in Washington is over who gets to write the first draft of reality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Felix
Add to List
