Politics & Power Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

Johnson isn’t describing civics; he’s describing power as an all-hours contact sport. “Continuously, incessantly, and without interruption” lands like a whip crack because it rejects the comforting fantasy that legislation is a periodic negotiation conducted at a respectful distance. For LBJ, Congress isn’t a coequal branch you consult when convenient; it’s a living organism you have to keep in your hands, minute by minute, before it wriggles free.

The shock word “incestuous” is doing two jobs at once. It’s a deliberate moral transgression meant to yank the listener out of polite, constitutional language and into the ugly intimacy of governing: favors, flattery, pressure, traded promises, social proximity so close it feels improper. Johnson’s subtext is blunt: democratic outcomes are produced by relationships that look, from the outside, like contamination. He’s warning that high-minded distance is a luxury presidents can’t afford, and also signaling his own comfort with the transactional mess.

Context matters: this is the Great Society era, when Johnson, a former Senate majority leader, tried to move massive civil rights and anti-poverty legislation through a Congress built on seniority, backroom leverage, and regional veto points. His “Johnson Treatment” wasn’t a metaphor; it was a method. The quote’s intent is partly instructional (how to win) and partly justificatory (why arm-twisting is necessary). It also hints at a darker truth: if the relationship must be “almost” taboo to function, then the system rewards proximity to power more than transparency or principle.