Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Shapiro

Shapiro’s line lands like a cartoon panel: a sly reassurance with a barb tucked inside. He’s not simply labeling a few officials “authoritarian”; he’s sketching a recognizable type - the power-curious figure who tests boundaries by talking louder than the rules. The phrase “slightly disturbing tendency” is doing double duty: it understates the threat in the way democracies often do, while also implying the pattern is clear enough to diagnose. “Tendency” suggests habit, not accident.

Then comes the pivot: “so many checks and balances.” On the surface, it’s civic comfort food - the system will hold. But Shapiro’s real target is the theater of intimidation: the “noises.” Authoritarian moves often begin as sound before they become policy - rhetoric that normalizes contempt for courts, the press, or opposition, and conditions the public to accept rule-breaking as strength. Calling it “noises” is dismissive, but it’s also an accusation: these actors want attention, and attention is a form of power.

The subtext is a warning about complacency. Checks and balances are not automatic; they’re enforced by institutions staffed by people, and ultimately by a public that insists those constraints matter. Shapiro’s cartoonist instinct shows in the framing: he captures how democracies can both recognize an emerging threat and talk themselves into treating it as background static. The joke, uncomfortably, is that “just noises” is exactly how the noises get louder.