Politics & Power Quote by Michael Pollan

Pollan’s jab lands because it flips the usual political-news script: conflict is easy content, consensus is the real tell. When leaders perform antagonism, journalists dutifully narrate the cage match. Pollan is arguing that the more consequential story often lives in what both sides quietly protect: budgets that never shrink, industries that never lose, wars that remain “serious,” surveillance powers that keep expanding, donor ecosystems that stay untouched. Agreement, in his framing, isn’t harmony; it’s a shared perimeter.

The intent is corrective, almost methodological. He’s not telling reporters to ignore disagreement, but to treat it as theater until proven otherwise. The subtext: political leadership can be less a set of warring ideologies than a class with common interests. The fights are frequently about distribution of attention, not distribution of power. That’s why consensus becomes the better investigative lead: it reveals the assumptions that have been naturalized into “common sense,” the policies so stabilized they no longer need defending.

Context matters, too. Pollan’s public work (especially on food systems) has long traced how institutional incentives and corporate capture shape what looks like consumer choice or partisan debate. In that world, bipartisan agreement is often the footprint of entrenched lobbies, regulatory timidity, and a media cycle that rewards spectacle over structure. His line doubles as a critique of journalism’s incentive problem: outrage and rivalry are legible, clickable, and narratively satisfying; slow, cross-party complicity is harder to package, but closer to where outcomes get locked in.