Politics & Power Quote by David Korten

Korten’s line lands like a quiet indictment dressed up as a mild observation. “Actually” signals he’s rebutting a familiar civic lullaby: that Washington is full of well-meaning public servants who just disagree on policy. He’s not arguing about left versus right; he’s arguing about a scarcity of character and imagination. Pairing “integrity” with “vision” is deliberate. Integrity alone can sound like personal virtue, a private moral scorecard. Vision is public-facing: the capacity to see beyond the next election cycle, beyond donor demands, beyond the boundaries of what’s currently “realistic.” Korten suggests you can’t fix the system with one without the other.

The subtext is a critique of institutional incentives. If only “very few” politicians have both traits, the problem isn’t individual bad apples so much as a barrel engineered to bruise anyone who resists its logic. In activist rhetoric, this frames politics as a captured arena: corporate money, media cycles, partisan discipline, and professionalized careerism reward compliance and punish long-term thinking. It also positions the activist, implicitly, as the keeper of the longer horizon - someone speaking from outside the machine, where moral clarity is easier to claim.

Context matters: Korten is known for challenging corporate power and pushing for systemic economic reforms. So the quote isn’t simply cynicism; it’s a recruitment pitch. By lowering expectations of elected leaders, he raises the moral urgency of civic pressure, movement-building, and alternative institutions. The sting is strategic: disillusionment, properly aimed, can be turned into leverage.