Politics & Power Quote by Todd Gitlin

Legitimacy is the kind of national asset you only notice when it’s gone: an invisible credit score that determines whether people comply, consent, and believe. Gitlin’s bite is in the phrase “fancy term” - a sociologist’s self-aware wink that translates academic vocabulary into an indictment anyone can feel. He’s not lamenting a policy failure so much as a moral and institutional one: America didn’t merely make mistakes; it burned through the public’s willingness to treat those mistakes as honest, correctable, or even accountable.

“Squandered” carries the real accusation. It implies waste, entitlement, and a leadership class treating trust like an endless resource. The timeframe - “the past year and a half or so” - keeps the critique tethered to a specific political moment without naming names, which is part of the strategy. By refusing the comfort of a single villain, Gitlin points to a systemic erosion: credibility dissipates through small evasions, shifting rationales, and the gap between stated ideals and lived reality. Legitimacy collapses not when citizens disagree, but when they conclude the game is rigged or incoherent.

The subtext is a warning to liberals and conservatives alike: once legitimacy is depleted, power has to rely more on force, spectacle, or polarization. A government can survive unpopularity; it can’t easily survive disbelief. Gitlin’s sociological move is to frame the crisis not as ideology but as social glue: the shared assumption that institutions, however flawed, are still operating in good faith.