Politics & Power Quote by Wendell Phillips

Phillips skewers a particular species of political piety: the habit of talking about government as if it were nature itself, inevitable and unquestionable. His joke lands because it treats Congress - a messy, partisan, reversible human invention - as though it were gravity, a force that simply is. The comparison is deliberately absurd, and that absurdity is the point. When people speak as if institutions are as fixed as planets, they are smuggling in obedience as common sense.

The subtext is an abolitionist's impatience with "respectability" politics. Phillips spent his life watching moderates invoke procedure, constitutional scruples, and congressional timing as excuses to delay confronting slavery. In that light, the line isn't just anti-government; it's anti-fatalism. He targets the rhetorical move that turns political choice into cosmic necessity: Congress "keeps the planets" (the public, the states, the economy) "in their places", implying stability depends on deference. Phillips replies: no, stability is what power calls itself when it wants to be left alone.

The intent is to strip government of its borrowed sacredness and return it to the realm of accountable, alterable action. By choosing gravity - the most non-negotiable force imaginable - he exposes the psychological comfort of believing someone else is steering the universe. It's a warning about how easily civic language becomes theology: once you confuse legislation with physics, dissent starts to sound like heresy rather than democracy.