Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly’s sentence reads like tidy periodization, but it’s really a provocation about power: American politics, he implies, wasn’t born out of serene constitutional consensus so much as an early ideological knife fight with a clear winner. The calm, almost textbook cadence (“first phase,” “characterized by”) is doing cover for a much sharper claim: the founding argument ended not in balance but in capitulation. “Complete triumph” is the tell. It’s not just description; it’s a verdict.

In context, Croly is writing as a Progressive Era intellectual watching industrial capitalism swell beyond the old constitutional frame and searching the founding for a usable genealogy. Casting the Jeffersonian “Republicans” as triumphant isn’t simply about party labels; it’s about the long victory of suspicion toward centralized authority and administrative capacity. Federalism becomes, in his telling, the road not taken: a more robust national state, comfortable with energetic governance. Republican triumph signals a national habit of treating state power as inherently illegitimate unless tethered to localism, agrarian virtue, and anti-elite rhetoric.

The subtext is almost elegiac and strategic at once. Croly wants readers to see that America’s political DNA contains a built-in allergy to the kind of coordinated, expert-driven government modern life demands. By framing early history as a settled outcome, he frees Progressivism to position itself as a necessary corrective: not a radical break with the founding, but a recovery of what was defeated. The line works because it turns history into a pressure point, making ideology feel like inheritance rather than preference.