Education Quote by James L. Buckley

Democracy flatters the voter, but Buckley is more interested in flattering the officeholder's spine. The sentence is engineered to justify the rarest creature in modern politics: the representative who defies the numbers. "Principled votes" isn't a neutral phrase; it's a moral talisman meant to elevate dissent from mere contrarianism into civic duty. He pairs it with "educated understanding of the public interest", a formulation that quietly relocates expertise and legitimacy from the crowd to the legislator. The subtext is blunt: the public can be wrong about its own good, and leadership sometimes means overruling public opinion without calling it overruling.

The line's power comes from the delicately accusatory contrast: polls show "the public itself may have quite a different understanding" of its interests. Buckley never says "misinformed" or "irrational". He says "different", a lawyerly euphemism that allows him to critique mass opinion while sounding magnanimous. It's also a strategic preemption of the usual charge that politicians are "out of touch". Buckley concedes the gap, then reframes it as a test of virtue.

Context matters: Buckley came of age in an era when "public interest" was still a credible phrase in elite political speech, before hyper-partisan media and permanent polling turned governance into a feedback loop. Read today, the quote lands as both a defense of representative democracy and an anxiety about it: if leaders must act against the polls, they need a story that sounds like service, not arrogance. Buckley supplies that story, carefully.