Politics & Power Quote by Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s line is a democratic pep talk with teeth: it flatters the citizen while quietly drafting them into service. “The government is us” isn’t a civics-class truism; it’s a rhetorical shove against the popular fantasy that government is a distant creature that only does things to you. By collapsing the boundary between “they” and “we,” Roosevelt makes disengagement feel like a kind of self-betrayal. If “we are the government,” then corruption, incompetence, and cruelty aren’t alien invasions - they’re civic failures with local fingerprints.

The phrasing matters. The repetition (“us… we… you and I”) works like a chant, moving from the abstract to the intimate, making politics personal without sounding sentimental. It also carries an implicit warning: stop treating the state as a vending machine for benefits or a punching bag for grievances. You don’t get to outsource responsibility and keep your moral purity.

Context sharpens the intent. Roosevelt governed in the Progressive Era, when industrial capitalism had produced both dazzling wealth and brazen abuse: monopolies, machine politics, labor conflict, and a press full of scandal. His presidency leaned hard on the idea that a strong federal government could be an instrument of public will - trust-busting, conservation, regulation - but only if the public claimed ownership of it. The subtext is a rebuke to laissez-faire fatalism and to cynicism alike: if you want the “Square Deal,” you don’t merely demand it. You become the kind of citizenry capable of enforcing it.