Daily Inspiration Quote by Alexander Woollcott

Woollcott’s line lands like a well-aimed slap at a familiar American alibi: the tendency to treat democracy as a consumer product you can return when it disappoints. The first move is bait-and-switch. He opens by seeming to defend the system against the glib complaint that “democracy doesn’t work,” then immediately concedes the point: “Of course it doesn’t work.” That concession isn’t defeat; it’s a trapdoor. He flips “work” from something democracy does for you into something citizens must do for it. The pronoun shift matters. “It” becomes a lazy abstraction people gossip about; “we” becomes the accused party.

The subtext is moral, but Woollcott packages it as wit to make it harder to ignore. Democracy fails, he implies, less because it’s inherently flawed than because we want it to behave like a self-driving machine while we sit in the backseat complaining about the route. His phrasing also punctures a deeper fantasy: that political freedom is a natural state that simply persists unless actively attacked. For Woollcott, it’s closer to a muscle - unused, it atrophies; overused by demagogues, it tears.

Context sharpens the bite. Woollcott wrote in an era shadowed by the Great Depression and the rise of European fascism, when “democracy is inefficient” wasn’t just cocktail pessimism; it was propaganda’s opening argument. His intent is to deny authoritarians their easiest talking point by turning frustration inward. If democracy is failing, he suggests, the scandal isn’t that it’s broken. The scandal is that we’ve been expecting it to be automatic.