Daily Inspiration Quote by Irving Babbitt

“Democracy” here isn’t a cozy synonym for self-government; it’s a mass identity learning to talk like an empire. Babbitt’s phrasing is doing two things at once: blessing and warning. “Going forth” and “crusade” borrow the high romance of moral warfare, the kind of language that turns policy into destiny. It’s not accidental that the enemy is “imperialism,” a word that, even in Babbitt’s era, could mean both a concrete system of conquest and a convenient label for other people’s power.

Babbitt, a critic shaped by humanist suspicion of modern enthusiasms, is alert to the way democratic societies launder force through ideals. The subtext is that democracy doesn’t abolish coercion; it rebrands it. A crusade is righteous by definition, which is why it’s dangerous: it collapses debate into salvation. Once democracy sees itself as a moral engine, it can justify interventions, expansion, even violence, not as interests but as virtue. Anti-imperialism becomes a banner that can paradoxically authorize imperial reach.

Context matters. Babbitt is writing in the long shadow of late 19th-century European empire and early 20th-century American global ambition, when “making the world safe” rhetoric was becoming a modern script. His sentence anticipates a familiar pattern: democratic states claiming exceptional innocence while exporting power. The line’s bite is that it treats that innocence as performance - a crusade is not just a campaign, it’s a story people tell to feel clean while marching.