Despite the trend in recent decades to view Gulliver’s Travels as a general satire on the folly of mankind, this chapter argues that the Travels is a deeply partisan book. Swift’s text made a specific intervention in contemporary debates about the structural vulnerability of English political institutions. Most of the societies that Gulliver encounters are in terminal decline, resulting from political maladministration. The chapter highlights distinctive parallels of language and thought between Bolingbroke’s oppositional leaders for The Craftsman and the King of Brobdingnag’s assessment of the debased English constitution. Like the essays in The Craftsman, the Travels suggests that English politics has been corrupted by rigged elections, parliamentary placemen, and standing armies. References in the voyage to Lilliput suggest that this corruption of the English constitution, which had now reached a nadir under the ‘Robinocracy’ of Sir Robert Walpole, could be traced back to the death of Queen Anne, the persecution of his former ministers, and the suppression of the Tory opposition. Swift’s general satire against debased political institutions was therefore aimed at a specific political target: the men who based them.