Politics & Power Quote by Irving Babbitt

Babbitt is taking a swing at a certain sunny strain of democracy that treats “the people” as both moral compass and management plan. His target isn’t democracy as procedure; it’s democracy as romance: the belief that virtue and competence naturally pool in the crowd if only elites would stop interfering. In that light, “make light” is doing quiet work. It implies not just disagreement but frivolity, a willful refusal to treat standards and leadership as hard problems with trade-offs, training, and hierarchy.

The subtext is patrician but not merely snobbish. Babbitt, a leading voice in early 20th-century humanism, was writing against what he saw as the era’s moral looseness: mass culture, sentimentality, and a progressive confidence that institutions could be rebuilt without the inner discipline once supplied by religion, classicism, or inherited norms. “Unbounded faith” reads like an indictment of secular piety. The democratic idealist replaces old authorities with a new one: an idealized “plain people” who conveniently absolve the believer from making difficult judgments about excellence.

The line also reveals anxiety about leadership as an ethical category. Babbitt is warning that when standards are treated as “undemocratic,” power doesn’t disappear; it just goes unexamined, drifting toward charisma, popularity, and market appetite. He’s essentially arguing that democracy without cultivated restraint becomes a machine for confusing preference with merit, and sympathy with judgment.