"The more consciously democratic Americans became, however, the less they were satisfied with a conception of the Promised Land, which went no farther than a pervasive economic prosperity guaranteed by free institutions"
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Croly is needling an American reflex: we treat democracy like a delivery system for comfort, then act surprised when comfort doesn’t feel like destiny. His sentence pivots on a quiet paradox. As Americans become “more consciously democratic” - more self-aware about equality, participation, and rights - they grow “less satisfied” with an older, thinner national promise. The “Promised Land” used to be legible as a broad, almost automatic prosperity secured by “free institutions” (markets, constitutional safeguards, the basic machinery of liberalism). Croly suggests that once people start taking democracy seriously, mere abundance stops reading as moral fulfillment.
The subtext is a critique of the Gilded Age bargain: political freedom plus economic growth will take care of the rest. Croly is writing as industrial capitalism is concentrating power, turning “free institutions” into a kind of civic alibi. If the system is formally free, inequality can be framed as personal failure or natural order. His line rejects that dodge. A more democratic public begins to want something harder to quantify: real opportunity, social dignity, protections against private empires, a state capable of steering outcomes rather than simply blessing them.
Context matters. Croly’s progressivism (most famously in The Promise of American Life) tried to reconcile American individualism with the realities of modern mass society. He isn’t anti-prosperity; he’s anti-prosperity-as-substitute-for-purpose. The sentence works because it reframes dissatisfaction not as decadence but as democratic maturation: when people believe they count, they demand a national story bigger than a rising GDP.
The subtext is a critique of the Gilded Age bargain: political freedom plus economic growth will take care of the rest. Croly is writing as industrial capitalism is concentrating power, turning “free institutions” into a kind of civic alibi. If the system is formally free, inequality can be framed as personal failure or natural order. His line rejects that dodge. A more democratic public begins to want something harder to quantify: real opportunity, social dignity, protections against private empires, a state capable of steering outcomes rather than simply blessing them.
Context matters. Croly’s progressivism (most famously in The Promise of American Life) tried to reconcile American individualism with the realities of modern mass society. He isn’t anti-prosperity; he’s anti-prosperity-as-substitute-for-purpose. The sentence works because it reframes dissatisfaction not as decadence but as democratic maturation: when people believe they count, they demand a national story bigger than a rising GDP.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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