Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly’s sentence smuggles a provocation inside a bit of historical upholstery: American democracy, he implies, wasn’t born fully formed in 1776 so much as stitched together later, when rival elites decided cooperation was more useful than purity. The key move is in his casting of Jefferson’s Republicans not as eternal insurgents but as joiners - people who, at a decisive moment, “rallied” to the Union and even to “the existing Federalist organization.” That last phrase is doing the real work. Croly is telling you that institutions, not just ideals, manufacture democracy; and that democracy’s “traditional” fabric owes as much to administrative continuity as to revolutionary rhetoric.

The subtext is distinctly Progressive Era Croly: legitimacy comes from a strong national framework capable of absorbing conflict. Writing in the early 1900s, with industrial capitalism, political machines, and corporate power remaking the country faster than constitutional catechisms could keep up, Croly wanted readers to stop fetishizing anti-federal suspicion of centralized authority. His admiration for Jefferson’s supposed accommodation functions as a rebuke to contemporary romanticizers of decentralization: grown-up democracy, in his view, requires a center that can hold.

Even the metaphor matters. “Almost completely woven” suggests something crafted, contingent, and unfinished - a nation held together by deliberate interlacing of opposing threads. Croly isn’t praising Federalists or Republicans as moral victors; he’s praising the moment they agreed, however begrudgingly, to share a loom.