Politics & Power Quote by Peter Schuyler

“Lying” here isn’t framed as a personal moral failure; it’s pitched as job description. The opening hedge, “To be fair,” is doing strategic work: it performs reasonableness while smuggling in a brutal normalization. Schuyler isn’t defending politicians so much as resetting the baseline of what the audience should expect from them. If deception is “part and parcel,” outrage becomes naive, even childish.

The second sentence tightens the vise by shifting blame from individual character to political economy. “Every politician” is totalizing on purpose, a populist sledgehammer that collapses distinctions between parties, platforms, and temperaments. The phrasing “owned by the special interest groups” is meant to sting: it replaces the dignified language of representation with the language of property. Voters don’t get lied to because leaders are uniquely wicked; they get lied to because campaigns are financed, and financing comes with invoices.

Context matters: as a colonial-era New York power broker, Schuyler lived in a world where patronage, land, and factional loyalty were the real infrastructure of politics. Elections were not mass-democratic morality plays; they were transactions among elites, lubricated by favors and obligations. Read that way, the line carries a chilly pragmatism: stop pretending politics is a realm of pure speech when it’s built on dependency.

The subtext is an invitation to cynicism with a purpose. If the system manufactures lies, then demanding better people is a comforting fantasy. The uncomfortable implication is structural: reform the money, or learn to live with the fiction.