Herbert Croly Quotes About Democracy
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The essential nature of a democracy compels it to insist that individual power of all kinds, political, economic, or intellectual, shall not be perversely and irresponsibly exercised.
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If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow man, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.
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I am not concerned with dodging the odium of the word. The proposed definition of democracy is socialistic . . . (democracy) should be characterized not so much socialistic, as unscrupulously and loyally nationalistic.
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In Jefferson's mind democracy was tantamount to extreme individualism.
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Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility. If human nature cannot be improved by institutions, democracy is at best a more than usually safe form of political organization . . . . But if it is to work better as well as merely longer, it must have some leavening effect on human nature; and the sincere democrat is obliged to assume the power of the leaven. [Progressive]
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Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was preserved.
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Democracy may mean something more than a theoretically absolute popular government, but it assuredly cannot mean anything less.
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The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer Democracy in power and self-consciousness.
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The majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized works, or even by grave and manifest public need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to become disinterested in their individual purposes. In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between private and public interests.
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When Jefferson and the Republicans rallied to the Union and to the existing Federalist organization, the fabric of traditional American democracy was almost completely woven.
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