Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly’s line treats the Constitution less like a civic scripture and more like a negotiated truce. The phrasing does double work: “political faith” evokes the founders’ positive creed in republican self-government, while “political fears” admits the darker engine of design - anxiety about concentrated power, faction, demagoguery, and the sheer instability of a new nation. The sentence is built as a balancing act, mirroring the document it describes. “Expression” suggests belief made legible; “wrought” suggests something hammered into shape under pressure, not serenely authored.

The real bite is in the paired metaphors: the Constitution as “organ” and as “bulwark.” An organ is living, functional, meant to coordinate a body’s needs - here, “the national interest.” A bulwark is defensive architecture - a wall against intrusion. Croly is flagging an enduring American contradiction: we expect the federal government to act with national coherence, yet we also demand it be structurally prevented from acting too boldly. The document becomes both engine and brake.

Context matters. Writing in the Progressive Era, Croly argued that 18th-century constitutional machinery was ill-suited to 20th-century industrial capitalism and modern inequality. This formulation quietly advances his larger case: constitutional veneration is incomplete without acknowledging the fears baked into its checks, veto points, and decentralization. By naming “individual and local rights” as something the Constitution was built to shield, he’s also hinting at how those shields can harden into obstacles - protecting liberty, yes, but also protecting entrenched interests against democratic national reform.