"What this country needs is more unemployed politicians"
About this Quote
A neat little hand grenade of a line: it takes the most polite civic cliché, "the country needs", and swaps in a solution that sounds obscene only if you still believe politicians are automatically public servants. Angela Davis is working in the register of the insult, but the target is structural. "Unemployed" isn’t just a punchline; it’s a demand that political power become precarious, answerable, and removable - the condition most ordinary people live under all the time.
The subtext is Davis’s larger critique of the carceral state and racial capitalism: you can’t reform a system by asking its most invested managers to gently self-correct. The joke implies that too many elected officials function less like representatives and more like salaried gatekeepers for policing, privatization, and austerity. If they’re doing that work, the public doesn’t need more speeches, hearings, or bipartisan photo ops. It needs vacancies.
Context matters because Davis comes from a tradition that treats "law and order" as an ideological project, not a neutral promise. Her activism has long emphasized that institutions reproduce themselves through professional political classes who benefit from stability, not justice. So the line isn’t anti-politics in the lazy, cynic-at-the-bar sense; it’s anti-impunity. It imagines accountability with teeth: losing the job, not just taking a hit on Twitter.
There’s also a quiet reversal of empathy. We’re trained to worry about unemployment as a social crisis. Davis redirects that concern toward the people who least experience it, suggesting that a little instability at the top might be a public good.
The subtext is Davis’s larger critique of the carceral state and racial capitalism: you can’t reform a system by asking its most invested managers to gently self-correct. The joke implies that too many elected officials function less like representatives and more like salaried gatekeepers for policing, privatization, and austerity. If they’re doing that work, the public doesn’t need more speeches, hearings, or bipartisan photo ops. It needs vacancies.
Context matters because Davis comes from a tradition that treats "law and order" as an ideological project, not a neutral promise. Her activism has long emphasized that institutions reproduce themselves through professional political classes who benefit from stability, not justice. So the line isn’t anti-politics in the lazy, cynic-at-the-bar sense; it’s anti-impunity. It imagines accountability with teeth: losing the job, not just taking a hit on Twitter.
There’s also a quiet reversal of empathy. We’re trained to worry about unemployment as a social crisis. Davis redirects that concern toward the people who least experience it, suggesting that a little instability at the top might be a public good.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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