Daily Inspiration Quote by George Jean Nathan

Democracy, Nathan implies, doesn’t fail in grand, tragic acts; it fails in the quiet, self-satisfied shrug. The sting of his line is the reversal: “bad officials” aren’t primarily the product of villainous masses or corrupt machines, but of “good citizens” who outsource responsibility to their own self-image. “Good” is doing a lot of work here. It’s less a compliment than an accusation aimed at the respectable class that treats politics as something that happens elsewhere, to other people, by other means.

As an editor and critic steeped in early 20th-century American civic theatrics, Nathan knew how power really gets cast: not just by enthusiasm, but by inertia. The sentence is engineered like a moral boomerang. If you’re tempted to nod along, you’re already implicated. His phrase “the ones elected” shifts blame from officials to the system that legitimizes them, and then to the citizens who silently authorize that legitimacy by staying home. It’s less about individual candidates than about the vacuum nonvoters create - a vacuum that organized minorities, patronage networks, and ideologues are happy to fill.

There’s also a proto-media critique tucked inside. Nathan spent his life watching “good” people perform virtue in public and avoid mess in private. Voting is the least romantic civic act: brief, procedural, unglamorous. That’s exactly why he chooses it as the baseline test of citizenship. The subtext is brutal: if you want better leaders, stop treating participation like optional charity and start treating it like maintenance.