Politics & Power Quote by Ralph Nader

Nader’s line lands like a friendly warning with a knife behind it: politics is not a spectator sport, and neutrality is a luxury you don’t actually have. The verb choice does the heavy lifting. “Turn on” carries a 1960s double charge - wake up, get engaged, flip the switch - but it also hints at betrayal: something “turns on you” when you’re not watching. Nader compresses civic life into a simple asymmetry. You can choose attention, or you can be chosen as a target.

The intent is mobilization, but not the gauzy “be informed” kind. It’s about power’s default setting. Corporations, agencies, legislatures: they don’t pause because you’re busy. If you opt out, decisions still get made, just by the people with lobbyists, patience, and a filing cabinet full of leverage. The subtext is that political outcomes aren’t random storms; they’re engineered environments. If you don’t learn how the machine works, you live under its consequences as if they were weather.

Context matters. Nader built his public identity by showing how ordinary people get hurt when policy is left to insiders - unsafe cars, captured regulators, consumer rights treated as optional. So the quote isn’t moral scolding; it’s a tactical diagnosis from a lawyer who understands systems. Politics, for Nader, is less about ideological theater than about rules, enforcement, and who gets heard. Ignore it, and it won’t ignore you. It will draft you, bill you, surveil you, and call it “governance.”