Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly is doing a careful bit of ideological wiring: he grants “economic independence and prosperity” their starring role in the American self-image, then snaps them onto a second rail - “free political institutions” - as if the connection were not merely common, but “absolutely” inseparable. The sentence reads like a footnote, but it’s a pressure point. By insisting on what “the American mind” has “always” believed, he’s not describing history so much as prescribing a national common sense: if you want prosperity, you must defend (or build) the political machinery that makes it legitimate.

The intent is strategic. Croly wrote in the Progressive Era, when industrial capitalism was generating both unprecedented wealth and glaring insecurity: monopolies, labor conflict, urban poverty, corruption. In that environment, “economic independence” becomes a contested phrase. Independence for whom - the small proprietor, the wage worker, the corporation? Croly’s move is to treat prosperity as politically conditioned rather than naturally occurring, pushing back against the era’s laissez-faire story that markets simply reward virtue.

The subtext is a warning to both sides of the debate. To conservatives: you can’t invoke prosperity while tolerating political institutions captured by moneyed power; if democracy becomes theater, the prosperity story loses its moral anchor. To radicals: economic reform that discards liberal institutions risks severing the very association that makes American prosperity feel earned rather than imposed. Croly’s irony is that he’s describing a belief that is as much myth as memory - and using it anyway, because myths are how nations argue with themselves.