Politics & Power Quote by Adlai E. Stevenson

Stevenson is trying to rescue "politics" from its own bad branding. By defining it as "the people's business", he turns a word that often reads as backroom maneuvering into civic housekeeping: something public, practical, and owned. The phrasing is shrewdly corrective. He doesn't argue that politics can be noble; he insists that it already is, by definition, when done properly. That move quietly indicts the version Americans complain about: if politics looks like a racket, the problem isn't the concept, it's the hijacking of it.

The line also does something else: it reassigns responsibility. Calling politics "the people's business" flatters voters while also loading them with obligation. You can't dismiss politics as someone else's dirty work if it's your shop. Stevenson, an eloquent liberal in the Cold War era, was speaking to a public tempted by technocracy on one side and anti-government cynicism on the other. The mid-century American state was expanding at home and projecting power abroad; "business" here is not a metaphor for commerce so much as a metaphor for management and accountability. Someone has to run the machinery of democracy, and pretending you can opt out is itself a political choice.

"Most important business there is" is deliberate overstatement with a moral purpose. It elevates the mundane (budgets, schools, wars, rights) into a single arena where consequences land. Stevenson isn't romanticizing politics; he's warning that neglecting it doesn't make it disappear - it just hands it to the people who show up.