Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly’s sentence performs a neat Progressive Era two-step: it flatters America’s self-image while quietly putting it on probation. He starts with “of course,” a patrician throat-clear that treats “democratic” as the nation’s obvious moral north star, then immediately undercuts the comfort by calling that aspiration “vaguely described.” The subtext is a rebuke to civic complacency. Americans keep invoking democracy as a kind of ceremonial password, Croly suggests, without doing the harder work of specifying what it demands in practice.

The pivot comes with “actual achievement.” Croly isn’t hunting for democracy in founding myths or frontier folklore; he’s arguing that the real evidence is institutional and material: what the country has built, how it governs, how power and opportunity are distributed. That move matters in 1909, amid industrial consolidation, urban poverty, and labor unrest, when “democracy” could mean anything from laissez-faire individualism to mass participation to economic security. Croly’s project (most famously in The Promise of American Life) was to rescue the democratic ideal from being a mere rhetoric of rights and make it an agenda of capacity: a stronger national state, purposeful reform, and a public philosophy able to discipline private power.

“Adequate and fruitful definition” is the tell. He wants a democracy that produces outcomes, not just sentiments - one that can be measured against social aspirations like fairness, mobility, and collective self-rule. The line works because it claims continuity with the American story while insisting that the story is unfinished and, crucially, up for reinterpretation by reformers rather than nostalgists.