Politics & Power Quote by Gilbert Highet

Politics, in Gilbert Highet's framing, is less a noble contest of ideals than a sales pitch with consequences. The line compresses democratic life into a chain of verbs that feel transactional: "vote", "support", "endure". That last one is the tell. Voting is easy, supporting is ongoing, enduring is costly. Highet’s syntax quietly admits what civics books tend to blur: politics is the art of getting people to consent not just to policies they like, but to burdens they would not choose absent a promised payoff.

The quote works because it treats persuasion as the central political technology, replacing romance about "the public good" with a colder operating system: trade-offs packaged as hope. "This...that...these...those" reduces platforms to interchangeable products, a rhetorical shrug that suggests how easily causes are swapped as long as the mechanism stays intact. It’s a warning about how the future gets weaponized. Promises ("those") can be infinitely elastic; sacrifices ("these") are immediate and measurable. That imbalance is where manipulation lives, and Highet wants you to notice it.

Highet, a classicist and man of letters writing in the mid-20th century, had watched mass politics professionalize: propaganda techniques refined by war, advertising logic migrating into campaigns, public opinion becoming something to be managed. His skepticism isn’t anti-democratic so much as anti-illusion. The subtext is bracing: if you want to understand power, follow the persuader, not the slogan.