Politics & Power Quote by Theodore C. Sorensen

Sorensen’s optimism isn’t naive; it’s strategic. Written in the idiom of Cold War liberalism and Kennedy-era confidence, the line works like a pressure-release valve: it acknowledges “gloom” only to convert anxiety into civic reassurance. The intent is persuasion under stress - to keep a worried public inside the democratic tent by insisting the system contains its own antidote.

The rhetoric is almost legalistic, which fits a lawyer and presidential adviser: a chain of propositions, each narrower and more concrete than the last. “People are sovereign” is the constitutional premise. Then come the remedies: leaders replaced, policies changed, mistakes reversed. The cadence is therapeutic, a checklist of institutional exits from panic. It’s also quietly partisan in the deepest sense: not aligned to a party, but to process. Sorensen is selling procedure as moral salvation.

The subtext, though, is a warning disguised as comfort. If democracy is “inherently self-correcting,” the burden shifts to citizens to actually do the correcting. “Can be” does heavy lifting here - possibility, not guarantee. Democracies don’t magically heal; they rely on elections that function, norms that hold, media that informs, courts that remain credible. Sorensen’s soothing certainty is a bid to protect those fragile mechanisms by reminding readers they’re not spectators.

Context matters: mid-century America was wrestling with nuclear dread, civil rights upheaval, and the fear that democratic indecision would lose to authoritarian “efficiency.” Sorensen counters that temptation with a simple seduction of his own: patience. The system looks messy because it’s designed to give you a second chance.