Success Quote by Martin L. Gross

Legitimacy, in Martin L. Gross's framing, isn't a halo a government wears by default; it's a contract it has to keep earning. The line is blunt on purpose: it shifts the basis of political authority away from tradition, charisma, or even procedural legality and plants it in performance. Not "Who won?" but "What did you do with power once you had it?"

The intent is a pressure tactic disguised as a principle. By tying legitimacy to obligations, Gross smuggles in a civic yardstick that citizens can use when institutions fail them. It reads like a warning label: if the state can't deliver core duties - security, basic rights, competent administration, fair enforcement - it doesn't merely deserve criticism; it forfeits moral standing. That's a more combustible claim than it first appears, because it provides rhetorical cover for resistance: protest, noncompliance, reform movements, even radical reordering. The subtext is that obedience is conditional.

Gross, a writer known for scrutinizing government waste and institutional incentives, is speaking from a late-20th-century American mood in which distrust of bureaucracy and public-sector incompetence hardened into a cultural default. The quote echoes social-contract thinking but modernizes it with managerial language: "obligations" sounds less like philosophy and more like a service-level agreement. That's why it works. It translates a high-minded question - why do we accept being governed at all? - into an accountability metric. If legitimacy is measurable, it can be lost. And if it can be lost, power suddenly looks a lot less permanent.