Life & Wisdom Quote by Herbert Croly

Democracy, Croly implies, is less a natural weather pattern than a manufactured climate. "The popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created" lands as both a warning and a blueprint: public opinion is not a pure, spontaneously forming essence, but a product of institutions, leadership, and the stories a society tells itself about what is possible.

Croly was writing in the Progressive Era, when the United States was wobbling between mass politics and mass manipulation: industrial monopolies, urban machines, sensational newspapers, and a federal government still learning how to govern a modern economy. Against the era's comforting civics-myth - that the people already know what they want and government merely executes it - Croly argues that "the people" are not a single coherent actor until someone does the work of making them one. That work can look like civic education, party-building, and policy that clarifies stakes. It can also look like propaganda. The line is deliberately thin.

The subtext is a critique of laissez-faire democracy: if you leave "popular will" to emerge on its own, power fills the vacuum. Wealth, media, and entrenched interests will "create" it for you, just without admitting theyre doing it. Croly's provocation is to drag that reality into the open and give the project to reformers instead. Its an argument for democratic statecraft - not just counting preferences, but shaping conditions under which preferences become informed, organized, and actionable.

The sentence still stings because it collapses a comforting distinction. We like to imagine persuasion as optional and legitimacy as automatic. Croly insists legitimacy is built, and whoever refuses to build it is volunteering to be governed by those who will.