Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s line is engineered to sound like a jailbreak in reverse: instead of freeing the people from government, he wants to lock the government back up. “Cage of law” is doing the heavy lifting here, a deliberately punitive metaphor that treats the state not as a neutral referee but as a repeat offender. The intent is less procedural than moralistic: government power is presumed guilty, and “restore” implies a lost constitutional era when restraints actually held.

Then he pivots to the provocation: “the myth of democracy.” That phrase isn’t an abstract swipe at voting so much as an attack on the story modern democracies tell about themselves: that elections automatically confer legitimacy, that participation equals control, that consent is continuously renewed. Bovard’s subtext is classic libertarian skepticism: ballots can become a permission slip for coercion, and popular mandates can launder abuses into something polite. Calling democracy a “myth” also reframes dissent as realism. If you’re angry about surveillance, war powers, emergency orders, or regulatory sprawl, the real con, he suggests, is being told you already govern yourself.

Contextually, Bovard has built a career arguing that the administrative state and national-security apparatus operate with impunity while civic rituals provide cover. The quote is a pressure test for liberal pieties: if “democracy” means occasional voting while unelected institutions write the rules and expand their reach, then the cage isn’t law around government but government around the public. His rhetoric tries to make that inversion feel obvious - and urgent.