Success Quote by Walter Lippmann

Lippmann frames social movements as both diagnosis and leverage: they reveal where a society is hurting, and they supply the force capable of moving its institutions. The line is built on a bracing double bind. If leaders ignore movements, “statesmanship is irrelevant” - politics becomes theater performed behind soundproof glass. If leaders acknowledge them but “fail to use them,” statesmanship is merely “weak” - a kind of polite handwringing that recognizes pressure without converting it into policy.

The subtext is a rebuke to elite fantasies of control. Lippmann, a journalist who spent his career watching governments stumble through mass democracy, is warning that public life isn’t steered by enlightened administrators alone. It’s steered by organized energy: unions, suffragists, civil rights campaigns, antiwar coalitions. Movements are not just noisy interruptions; they are the raw material of change, the proof that something has become politically unavoidable.

The phrase “at once” matters. Lippmann refuses the comforting idea that movements are either noble engines of reform or chaotic mobs. They are both: symptoms (of inequality, exclusion, exploitation) and instruments (capable of rewriting law, norms, and party agendas). In the early-to-mid 20th century - with labor upheavals, the New Deal order, and the rise of propaganda and mass media - Lippmann understood how quickly legitimacy shifts when crowds and headlines converge.

His intent isn’t romantic. It’s tactical. Serious governance, he implies, requires translating moral urgency into durable institutions before it curdles into backlash or despair.