Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s phrase “attention deficit democracy” is a wickedly compact diagnosis: a political system that still holds elections and stages debates, but can’t sustain the basic civic act of paying attention. He’s not lamenting distraction as a lifestyle problem; he’s treating it as the enabling condition for institutional rot. The intent is alarmist by design, but not sloppy: the metaphor of a “death spiral” borrows from aviation and finance, suggesting a self-reinforcing collapse where each correction attempt accelerates the fall.

The subtext is a three-part chain of culpability. “Mass ignorance” isn’t just voters being uninformed; it’s the predictable outcome of information overload, partisan media incentives, and civic education treated as optional. “Fear mongering by the government” positions the state not as a neutral administrator but as an active producer of panic, because fear short-circuits scrutiny and makes emergency powers feel like common sense. “Lying politicians” completes the loop: once attention is fragmented and fear is primed, dishonesty becomes low-risk and high-reward.

Contextually, Bovard has built a career as a civil-liberties skeptic of state power, especially in post-9/11 America, where security rhetoric repeatedly justified surveillance, secrecy, and executive overreach. The line works because it indicts both the supply side (politicians, government messaging) and the demand side (a public trained to scroll past complexity). It’s less a plea for better manners in politics than a warning that a democracy can keep its rituals long after it has lost its reflex for truth-testing.