Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s sentence reads like a civic-minded throat-clearing, but the real action is in how hard it leans on the obvious. “A lot of benefits” is deliberately non-specific, the kind of phrasing that signals he’s less interested in selling democracy as utopia than in reminding you what it’s supposed to prevent. That vagueness is a tell: in Bovard’s world, the details of “representative government” are always under siege by the very people claiming to protect it.

The repetition of “far better” does rhetorical work that’s almost defensive. It suggests a moment when the comparison isn’t merely theoretical. You don’t hammer “far better” unless you think your audience is flirting with, excusing, or normalizing the alternatives. And notice the two villains he names: “dictatorial system” and “one-man rule situation.” The duplication implies a warning about slide, not switch. Democracies don’t typically announce, “We are now a dictatorship.” They drift: emergency powers, strongman charisma, legislative surrender, bureaucratic muscle replacing consent.

Bovard, a libertarian-leaning critic of state power, often writes from the premise that government’s default setting is expansion. That makes this line less a valentine to institutions than a boundary marker. The subtext: representative government is imperfect, frequently hypocritical, and easy to corrupt, but it still distributes power enough to make abuses contestable. “One-man rule” isn’t just tyranny; it’s the end of accountability as a living practice.