Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly is trying to rescue American democracy from what he sees as its own naïve self-image: the idea that freedom is primarily an individual possession and that the nation is merely a legal arrangement you can opt into or out of. The phrasing is diagnostic and slightly scolding. “Distracting” is doing real work here, implying that individualism isn’t just wrong, it’s a shiny decoy that keeps citizens from noticing how power actually gets organized and exercised. “Merely legal” is the other blade: a Union held together by paperwork and procedure, without thicker bonds of loyalty and shared purpose, is a Union that will eventually face a stress test it cannot pass.

The context is Croly’s Progressive-era project (most famously in The Promise of American Life) to justify a stronger national state as the instrument of democratic ends. He’s writing after industrial capitalism has reorganized the country, when “local control” and formal rights look inadequate against corporate scale. That’s why the Civil War appears here less as tragic rupture than as clarifying necessity: the moment when the nation learned that sovereignty and solidarity are not optional add-ons.

The subtext is strategic, even provocative. Croly praises “the followers of Jackson and Douglas” not because he agrees with their politics wholesale, but because he wants to recruit their populist, majoritarian energy for national consolidation. He’s reframing Union preservation as a democratic achievement rather than a constitutional technicality, arguing that the country had to outgrow its thin, legalistic nationalism to become a modern polity capable of collective action.