Happy Birthday, Alexis!

[Corlyss_D]

Tocqueville at 200
He'd recognize much about America today.

Friday, July 29, 2005 12:01 a.m.

When Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, arrived in Newport, R.I., in May 1831, the country was barely 50 years old--and Tocqueville wasn't yet 26. Andrew Jackson was president and John C. Calhoun was vice president. Politically, the event of the year was Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia. Steamships existed and a primitive rail system had just come into service, but the first of the wagon trains had yet to cross the Rockies. In faraway Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, then 22, gave his first political speech (atop a beer keg) on the subject of "the navigation of the Sangamon River."
This protean nation seems irretrievably distant. Yet the chief measure of Tocqueville's greatness--which we celebrate today on his 200th birthday--is that, in reading his "Democracy in America," we instantly recognize ourselves.

Tocqueville's theme was the effect of equality on the manners of man. Of course, 1830s America was far from being an equitable place: Women couldn't vote, and there were two million slaves out of a total population of 12 million. Yet even then democracy had taken sufficient root to make its enduring characteristics clear, at least to Tocqueville's observant eye. And what he saw in America was the future of all mankind: "To attempt to check democracy," he wrote, "would be . . . to resist the will of God."
Unlike his contemporary Karl Marx, however, Tocqueville did not confuse historical inevitability with utopia. He understood that the notion of equality was as compatible with tyranny as it was with freedom, a truth made plain by the experience of communist "people's republics" in the 20th century.

Tocqueville also understood that even liberal democracies were prone to a host of vices: mediocrity of taste and expression; a sameness of thought; a mindless pursuit of physical comfort; social atomization. Contemporaneous European visitors such as Fanny Trollope often saw these vices as proof of American inferiority. Tocqueville knew better: What America was, Europe, in its laggard way, would be too, and the task for serious political thinkers wasn't to condescend but to find within democratic life the resources by which it could be sustained and improved.

What resources? Local government, for one, which transforms rugged individualists into citizens and counteracts the democratic tendency toward bureaucratic centralization. Civic associations, for another, which create communities of interest, taste and conviction and thus check the potentially tyrannical power of the majority. Religious belief, for a third, which elevates men above their material fixations and furnishes democracy with the public morality it requires.

America has undergone vast changes since the 1830s. It is a freer country now, and infinitely richer, although the size and reach of the federal government would surely have frightened Tocqueville. Still, we're confident that today's America is one that he would have no trouble recognizing. No doubt, too, the cures he would prescribe would be the same. They are as salutary as ever.

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[Ralph]

My favorite quotation from my Con Law casebook and which, for many students, is their first introduction to de Tocqueville:

"There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one"

[Corlyss_D]

My favorite quotation from my Con Law casebook and which, for many students, is their first introduction to de Tocqueville:

"There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one"

We hear that a lot lately, esp. in connection with the culture wars and the rethinking of things we all thought were settled aeons ago.

When I read it, for the first time a couple of years ago (I was supposed to read it in college, but who reads anything you're not tested on in college?), I was struck by the amount of time he spent discussing how Americans coalesce into small groups to do most any and every thing. When you think about it, it's so untribal. You have neighborhood thises, and school thats, and church meetings (he's big on those as a core instrument of civic action), and sewing circles, and political meetings, and professional groups, and reading societies, and town halls. The list is virtually endless, i.e., whatever endeavors and American can find an interest in will be reflected in a group or meeting or society of some kind and those groups, significantly, reinforce the ability of other groups to get things done that need doin'. If there is anything that persages (or adumbrates) the American political genius, it's pragmatism and this facility with working in small groups to get things done.

And when you think about it, it's the vehicle thru which trust is widely activated in the body politic: we meet our neighbors and friends and even our adversaries in so many forming, dissolving, and reforming group contexts that we grow comfortable with each other and learn how to work together even if we don't see eye to eye on every issue. I don't think personal and community relations ever really degenerates into "my tribe" versus "your tribe" or "my neighborhood" versus "your neighborhood" like we see so often elsewhere. I've been thinking a lot about this lately.

[Ralph]

And CMG is a tribe too albeit not the most exclusive kind.