Democracy in America

Democracy in America and Two Essays on America by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Gerald E Bevan, 935 pages

There is an amusing irony in the fact that the book which best defines the American character was written in French, by a Frenchman, for a French audience.  Yet, especially when the ideological struggles of the twentieth century made the question of national identity a matter of considerable urgency, it has been in Democracy in America that Americans have found their standard.  Henry Adams declared it the "gospel of my private religion", and it has been quoted by every president from Eisenhower to Obama (and quoted just as avidly by the opponents of those same presidents).  It has been suggested (no doubt correctly) that, like the Bible, Democracy in America has passages that can support virtually any argument (and when none will suit, invention fills the need, as is the case with the famous but spurious "America is great because America is good" quotation) - its popularity and flexibility prompted Russell Baker to quip, "of all the great unread writers I believe Tocqueville to be the most widely quoted."

A minor aristocrat pursuing a career in the civil service, in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in search of the future.  He had become convinced that the inexorable tide of history was pushing towards the elimination of all distinctions between persons - something he did not regard as an unalloyed good.  In the United States during the presidency of frontiersman Andrew Jackson he found the ideal of the classless society which somehow managed to avoid anarchy.  His examination of the peculiarities of the American Constitution, culture, and character that made this possible demonstrates remarkable insight and holds far-reaching implications.

It is difficult to refrain from reading Tocqueville with a jaundiced eye, noting the failing of those qualities he admired in the American experiment and the widening of the faults.  It is no longer possible to say that the American people feel responsible for making their laws and therefore respect them, that universal religiosity detoxifies individualism by inspiring a commitment to the common good, or that debates in the US Senate "would bring glory to the greatest parliamentary debates of Europe."  Instead, it seems that we have travelled further into an age "where nothing is consistent, where virtue is without genius, genius without honor, where the love of order is joined to an inclination for tyranny and the holy worship of liberty to a disdain for the law, where conscience casts a dim light upon human actions and where nothing any longer seems to be prohibited or permitted, honest or shameful, true or false".  Indeed, nothing seems to threaten the continuing ascendancy of those "who strive, in the name of progress, to turn men into materialistic beings and who want to discover the expedient while paying scant attention to fairness, knowledge far removed from beliefs, and prosperity which has nothing to do with virtue."   Nothing, unless the same strengths Tocqueville identified nearly two hundred years ago can somehow be given new life.