Politics & Power Quote by Edward Bond

Bond’s line has the sting of a playwright who’s spent decades watching “civilized” societies stage-manage their own innocence. The provocation is the first clause: violence isn’t just a breakdown of democracy, it’s embedded in its architecture, concealed by procedure, law, and polite language. He’s aiming at the comforting myth that ballots and parliaments automatically pacify a nation. For Bond, they can just as easily launder force, turning coercion into policy, poverty into “austerity,” surveillance into “security,” war into “humanitarian intervention.” The violence remains; the vocabulary gets cleaner.

“Not radically democratic” is the key insult. He’s not talking about democracy as a ritual of voting, but as a daily distribution of power: who owns, who decides, who gets protected, who gets sacrificed. When those fundamentals are off-limits, democracy becomes a performance of consent. People are invited to choose managers, not to rewrite the terms of life.

Then he twists the knife: “domestic convenience of consumerism.” Western democracy, in this frame, is less a moral achievement than a household appliance for capitalism, keeping the peace at home so shopping can continue. Comfort becomes ideology; consumption becomes citizenship; unrest gets treated as a customer-service problem. The subtext is Bond’s theatrical obsession: what a culture teaches itself not to see. His intent isn’t to sneer at democratic ideals, but to argue that without deeper economic and social equality, democracy doesn’t eliminate violence - it simply relocates it, professionalizes it, and makes it harder to name.