Politics & Power Quote by Lewis Mumford

Mumford’s barb lands because it refuses the comforting civics-myth that “government” is some distant machine run by alien species. In a democracy, he suggests, treating the state as an external force isn’t just inaccurate; it’s disabling. If government is imagined as Them, politics becomes spectatorship: you complain, you “hold them accountable,” you wait for reforms to arrive like weather. The handicap is psychological before it’s procedural. It shrinks agency, narrows responsibility, and makes civic life feel like a customer-service dispute rather than a shared project.

Then comes the twist of the knife: “sometimes the government confirms their opinion.” Mumford isn’t letting bureaucracies off the hook. He’s acknowledging the perverse feedback loop democracies can create. Citizens disengage, institutions harden; institutions harden, citizens feel vindicated in disengaging. The line has the dry, sociological sting of someone who has watched democratic ideals get swallowed by administrative routines, technocratic distance, and the quiet arrogance of expertise.

Context matters: Mumford wrote across an era of mass industrialization, world wars, and the expansion of the modern administrative state. He worried about “megamachines” - large systems that turn human beings into components. This quote reads like a warning flare from inside that transformation: democracy can survive elections and still lose the felt sense of self-rule, if people stop recognizing the state as an extension of collective choices. The subtext is bracingly moral: if you want a government that looks like “us,” you have to act like “us” exists.