Talk Doesn’t Matter?

If politics is concerned with who gets what, or with the authoritative allocation of values, one may be pardoned for wondering why it need involve so much talk. An individual or group can most directly get what it wants by taking it or by force and can get nothing directly by talk.  The obvious difficulty is the possibility of resistance, and it is the counterforce that talk may circumvent.

Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics