Politics & Power Quote by Walter Lippmann

A century later, Lippmann still lands the punch: mass democracy doesn’t just elect leaders; it keeps them in a permanent audition. The line is built to sound clinical - “sensitive,” “vehemence,” “mass sentiment” - but the subtext is anxious and faintly accusatory. He’s sketching a system where legitimacy is less a stable mandate than a daily referendum, and where governing becomes indistinguishable from campaigning.

The key move is his reframing of power as insecurity. “No sure tenure” turns office into a rental agreement that can be canceled at will; “perpetual office seekers” implies that even incumbents are, psychologically and structurally, candidates. Lippmann isn’t condemning voters exactly so much as the conditions that make “restless constituents” the primary audience for every decision. When the crowd’s mood is the governing weather, public men learn to read gusts instead of charts. Policy becomes performance management.

Context matters: Lippmann wrote in an era of mass newspapers, propaganda shocks from World War I, and the early architecture of modern public relations - the moment when “public opinion” stopped being a philosophical ideal and became a manipulable force. His worry is not that citizens care too much, but that mass sentiment can be both volatile and manufacturable, rewarding politicians who placate, posture, or panic rather than those who plan.

The sentence’s cool authority masks a bleak thesis: democratic accountability, pushed to the extreme by constant pressure, can hollow out the very capacity to govern.