Political Entrenchment Quotes

Britain is no longer in the politics of the pendulum, but of the ratchet.

The captains of the [political] system become the captives of the system.

If a legislator is safe from competition, or if he represents groups with the same economic and political beliefs, he does not have to change his ideas or respond to the needs of the broader population. He can rest content with a mediocre, absentee performance knowing he will be returned to office. And as he is returned year after year the seniority system gives him immense control over people from other parts of the country whose views he need not heed at all.

David Roberts, who is a writer at Vox who I like, had a line about the voter - your voters weren't locked in the room with you, Republican establishment. You were locked in the room with them.

Washington has become a permanent feudal class of insiders …those are people who are formally in office, staffers, journalists, hangers on … that becomes self-perpetuating … a Congress in which 42 percent become lobbyists… You have people coming here with no intention of going back to the farm.

The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.

The older generations are too wedded to political parties, too wedded to romantic memories of what education was like when they were kids, and too wedded to the status quo group that clings to power.

There's still is a status-quo group at City Hall who likes things done the old way, behind closed doors.

Sometimes in Congress I believe change is impossible …. Democrats read too many polls to change the climate. Republicans benefit from the climate too much to want to change it.

Patronage can result in the entrenchment of one or a few [political] parties to the exclusion of others.

Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive.

The more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

After 30 years in Washington, it is clear that Mitch McConnell has lost touch with our state, its people, and our values.

Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by which they have once won office.

I have long held that this is a one party government, the incumbent party.

Whenever a political party is out of power for a number of years and finally is back in power, they always overreach.

How many times have we seen politicians in office become cut off from the outside world and become unaware that the world has moved on?

I think a sitting senator who's been there 36 years is not doing a favor to anyone in the state of Utah nor to the country.

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

If legislators are allowed to continuously redistrict throughout the decade, you are going to have no way of using elections to remove unpopular officeholders because the lines will be redrawn to ensure their reelection.

If you look at Washington right now, we do not have a system that the Founding Fathers envisioned, where people go to Washington and be part of the servant class. Instead, we have a permanent political class that fashions itself the rulers of the people.

In its early days, Trump's presidency ought to be viewed as the arduous start to the complicated task of draining the Washington swamp.

There is a tendency in all parties, when they have been for a long time in possession of power, to augment it.

You have a political elite that has been in power since 1979. Typically what happens with this elite, and it has happened in Iran, is that they get more and more out of touch with the realities of the ordinary citizens.

Our whole system is rigged to keep the incumbents in office.