"There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible"
About this Quote
Richardson isn’t just diagnosing malfunction; he’s describing a political culture that has taught citizens to stop expecting results. The pivot from “failure” to “futility” is the tell. Failure still implies a standard and the possibility of repair. Futility signals something worse: the belief that the system is structured to absorb effort and return nothing. That’s not a policy critique so much as an indictment of legitimacy.
His metaphors do careful work. A “cruel shell game” casts legislation as performance art with a rigged outcome: the ball is never where the public is told to look. “Cruel” matters because it suggests intent, not accident. Then the “bureaucratic maze” takes aim at the administrative state’s front door, where real people meet government through forms, lines, eligibility rules, and opaque casework. “Inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible” is a tight triad that escalates from cost to cognition to exclusion. It’s not merely slow; it’s unreadable; it’s effectively closed.
Coming from Richardson - a lawyer and prominent public servant associated with the post-Watergate credibility crisis - the subtext is establishment alarm, not outsider rage. He’s warning that procedural complexity has become a political technology: delay, diffusion of responsibility, and technical language that protects institutions from accountability. The context is late-20th-century governance drifting toward managerial sprawl and televised cynicism, when “how a bill becomes a law” starts to feel less like civics and more like misdirection. Richardson’s real target is the emotional end-state: a citizenry trained to disengage because engagement has been engineered to feel pointless.
His metaphors do careful work. A “cruel shell game” casts legislation as performance art with a rigged outcome: the ball is never where the public is told to look. “Cruel” matters because it suggests intent, not accident. Then the “bureaucratic maze” takes aim at the administrative state’s front door, where real people meet government through forms, lines, eligibility rules, and opaque casework. “Inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible” is a tight triad that escalates from cost to cognition to exclusion. It’s not merely slow; it’s unreadable; it’s effectively closed.
Coming from Richardson - a lawyer and prominent public servant associated with the post-Watergate credibility crisis - the subtext is establishment alarm, not outsider rage. He’s warning that procedural complexity has become a political technology: delay, diffusion of responsibility, and technical language that protects institutions from accountability. The context is late-20th-century governance drifting toward managerial sprawl and televised cynicism, when “how a bill becomes a law” starts to feel less like civics and more like misdirection. Richardson’s real target is the emotional end-state: a citizenry trained to disengage because engagement has been engineered to feel pointless.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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