Politics & Power Quote by William Scranton

Scranton’s line is a velvet-gloved warning: government doesn’t fail in a vacuum; it fails in proportion to how willingly citizens outsource attention. Coming from a mid-century Republican governor and later Nixon-era diplomat, it reads less like a civics-text platitude than a diagnosis of a democracy sliding from participation into spectatorship. The “direct relationship” phrasing borrows the cool authority of a scientific law, as if to tell voters: you can argue about taxes and treaties all you want, but the real variable is you.

The intent is partly motivational, partly defensive. It flatters the electorate with agency while quietly shifting responsibility for governmental outcomes onto public engagement. If institutions disappoint, Scranton implies, look first to civic habits: turnout, local organizing, scrutiny of officials, willingness to sit through the boring parts. The subtext is also an elite’s frustration with apathy: democracy is not a service you consume but a system you maintain, and maintenance is tedious.

Context matters: Scranton belonged to a fading moderate Republicanism that valued competence, incremental reform, and institutional legitimacy. In that political culture, citizen interest wasn’t just a moral good; it was the lubricant that kept compromise and oversight functioning. Read today, the quote feels almost accusatory in its calmness. It suggests that the hollowing out of public trust isn’t merely a betrayal from above, but a feedback loop: disengagement invites capture, capture deepens cynicism, cynicism justifies disengagement. Scranton’s neat equation is the point - it’s meant to be hard to argue with, and harder to evade.