Politics & Power Quote by Ed Koch

Ed Koch’s “The Republicans are coming - make nice” lands like a stage whisper in the middle of a budget knife fight: a warning dressed up as advice. Koch, a New York City mayor who made performance a governing tool, isn’t praising bipartisanship so much as narrating power’s weather report. The line works because it’s simultaneously urgent and flippant. “Are coming” borrows the old alarm-bell cadence of invasion rhetoric, but the punchline is bureaucratic: “make nice.” It reduces ideology to etiquette, implying that in politics, civility is often less a virtue than a survival tactic.

The intent is practical: brace your allies, discipline your coalition, and preempt the moral grandstanding that gets you rolled when the other side gains leverage. Koch is speaking to Democrats, to city stakeholders, to anyone accustomed to New York’s machine-era roughhousing. When Republicans are ascendant - in Washington, Albany, or the donor class - the city’s appetite for righteous combat suddenly has a price tag. “Make nice” means stop freelancing, stop burning bridges, stop treating negotiation as capitulation; the bills still have to get paid.

The subtext is Koch’s trademark realism: politics isn’t a seminar, it’s a crowded elevator. You might dislike the people getting on, but you still need to share the ride without starting a fire. He’s also signaling his own brand: a Democrat comfortable with triangulation, ready to look unsentimental if it keeps the city functional. It’s wit with a hard edge, a reminder that power changes the rules faster than anyone’s principles do.