Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly is pointing to a quiet kind of revolution: the moment the so-called revolutionaries stop trying to tear down the machine and start learning to drive it. Jefferson’s Republicans campaigned against Federalist centralization, elite governance, and the implied reach of national power. Yet once in office, they didn’t replace the system so much as inherit it, refine it, and normalize it. Croly’s provocation is that this pragmatic “conversion” mattered almost as much as ratifying the Constitution itself, because it stabilized the basic architecture of American government not by legal assent but by partisan surrender.

The intent is less to praise Jefferson than to diagnose how legitimacy is manufactured. A constitution on paper is brittle; a constitution accepted by its enemies becomes durable. When the opposition adopts your structure, the debate shifts from whether the state should exist in a given form to who gets to control it. Croly is tracking the instant American politics becomes recognizably modern: institutions outlast ideologies because winners and losers both come to see the same framework as the arena worth fighting in.

The subtext carries Croly’s Progressive-era preoccupations. Writing in a time of industrial concentration and reformist ambition, he’s arguing that political development often happens through adaptation rather than clean breaks. Jefferson’s party, by governing through the inherited Federalist toolkit, effectively ratified a stronger national state. Croly wants readers to notice that “anti-establishment” movements, once responsible for governing a large republic, often consolidate the very powers they once feared - and that consolidation can be the real founding.