Politics & Power Quote by Mike Lowry

Lowry’s line is a neat act of political jujitsu: it takes the standard civic complaint - “government is broken” - and flips the blame back onto the people making it. The phrasing matters. “What’s wrong” isn’t aimed at bureaucrats, lobbyists, or some faceless “Washington”; it’s aimed at “we,” a deliberately inclusive pronoun that refuses the comfort of spectatorship. Lowry, a politician, is also implicitly indicting his own industry, but he does it by widening the frame: government is not a product you purchase, it’s a system you co-author.

The most revealing word is “participating.” He doesn’t say “voting,” which would shrink civic duty to a twice-a-decade ritual. “Participating” smuggles in a bigger, messier agenda: showing up at meetings, organizing, calling, testifying, serving, paying attention. It’s an argument against political consumerism - the modern habit of reviewing government like a bad restaurant while refusing to enter the kitchen.

The second half is aspirational but strategically vague: “the type of government it needs to be.” Lowry avoids naming a specific ideology, which makes the sentence portable across causes. That vagueness isn’t cowardice; it’s a recruitment tool. It invites listeners to project their own vision of “needs” while binding them to a premise: legitimacy and performance are not delivered from on high, they’re built through pressure, involvement, and shared responsibility.

In an era of cynicism, the subtext is blunt: if you want better outcomes, stop treating democracy like background noise.