When the French nobleman, diplomat and gifted observer Alexis de Tocqueville toured a young and expanding America in 1831 he found a nation of hardworking people willing to sacrifice their social and economic advances to the “good of the many.” He called this fledgling constitutional democracy a picture of “equality in action.”
These and his many other assorted observations were perhaps overly generous. That is because he had sailed from a France and Europe that was caught-up in various cultural fevers and revolutionary political strife. (More on that below.)
We can’t help but wonder what Tocqueville would make of our America today if he could descend from his heaven and enlighten us all over again as he did when he published his two-volume “Democracy in America” in 1835 and 1840.
A more mature America?
Were he to have attended this month’s Republican and Democratic party conventions in Milwaukee and Chicago what would he have seen? There were two stages and settings — 85 miles apart — full of duplicate red, white and blue bunting and balloons and copycat campaign placards reading “Patriotism” and “Freedom.”
But he also would have found two very different moods and visions that likely would have shocked him. We think he would have been forced to re-think some of his original observations about democracy and America from 193 years ago.
At the Republican confab, Tocqueville would have encountered a fiery gathering driven by a rage to turn its back on a century of expanded equality and social inclusiveness in exchange for a government too reminiscent to him of the French monarchs and aristocracies he had disavowed so, so long ago.
But equally perplexing to him would be the near-total conformity of political sympathies of the Democrats as they wriggled to show a face of freshened unity, only to exhibit some of the traits Tocqueville first became alarmed about in that younger America where he warned about a potential “tyranny of the majority.” (Conformity rules.)
At Chicago, Tocqueville would see many, many descendants of ex-slaves, not only in the crowd but also in leadership roles on the main stage led by Kamala Harris. After he learned that America had already elected a Black president 16 years earlier, the French visitor might next take notice of how many young faces of many other colors also were surrounding him.
At Milwaukee the racial makeup and messaging would look quite different. Taunts about mass deportation of recent immigrants and support for policies to restrict voting rights and eliminate public programs to promote equality probably would not sit well with the Frenchman who considered himself a “populist” even though he had been born into aristocracy.
It wouldn’t take Tocqueville more than a few glimpses to discern how these two competing political parties had mapped out very different future visions for America.
Return of a Citizen King
During his nine-month visit in 1831, Tocqueville, age 25, was astonished to find people and communities hard at work, improving their lives and riches and seeking greater freedoms and justice for themselves without concern for class status or by being coerced by a higher aristocracy.
But he also penned several cautions about whether this drive for equality might erode individual liberties for the sake of a new democratic order based on the rule of a majority. He wondered: was America’s allegiance to democratic deliberations just another form of autocracy, only without a king or queen on a throne? He called this a “soft despotism.”
Tocqueville would easily confuse the 2024 version of the Republican Party with the French constitutional monarchy led by Louis Philippe who was king during his American visit in 1831. Philippe was known as the “Citizen King.” And we think Tocqueville would consider the current Republican Party leader and presidential candidate as a man seeking that same royal title and nickname.
Visiting this year’s Democratic Party Convention, Tocqueville would not have found any evidence about the shape of the same party of just one month before. Where did all the joyless fears go about having a leader who was too old and the prospect of a dead-end political path? And how did over-brimming joy and confidence in a winning future rise to a full consensus so fast? Like most of us, Tocqueville would not have had a clue.
Make America exactly what again?
Where is this present-day America headed? Has democracy now become just a contest of slogans, packaged personalities and safe choices? We’d all like to know how the word freedom can be used to mean both individual choice and the right to dictate other’s liberties.
Andrew Jackson was president when Tocqueville made his visit. It was a political era with many similarities to today’s. Jackson had lost the presidential election of 1824 that was as bitter, divisive and inconclusive as the Trump-Biden election of 2020.
Neither Jackson nor his leading opponent John Quincy Adams won enough electoral college votes to be declared the winner in the four-candidate race. The House of Representatives then held a contingent election where Adams, the more establishment-favored son of former president John Adams, outmaneuvered Jackson for the win.
By the time Jackson ran again in 1828, America had become a very divided country on several fronts. Besides the slavery question, Jackson was challenging a growing monopoly of railroad, bankers and other industrialists and claimed to be a “man of the people.” He trounced Adams in a head-to-head race and he set out to settle some personal and political grievances.
Tocqueville interviewed Jackson in The White House and wrote of his encounter in his later published volumes, thusly: “(He’s) strong due to a support that his predecessors did not have. He tramples underfoot his personal enemies wherever he finds them, with an ease that no President has found.”
But Tocqueville shared an admiration for Jackson as a president who “broadened enfranchisement” to the non-aristocratic masses. He called him a true populist who led record-breaking turnouts of voters and public engagements across all strata of the country’s population. But he also called Jackson “a man of violent temperament and mediocre abilities.”
Jackson left the presidency in 1837, some 25 years before the outbreak of the Civil War that happened four years after Tocqueville’s death in Paris in 1859. In Europe, Karl Marx was a university student and working on his pre-doctorate thesis on theology and philosophy, published in 1841. In that same year, Tocqueville was invited to join the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that had been co-founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743. (We offer all this as historical context.)
March of Democracy
At this year’s Democratic Party Convention there were many warnings that Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda represented an “existential threat” to American democracy. It is likely that Tocqueville would have agreed with President Joe Biden’s warnings in his farewell speech about the opponent he defeated in 2020 by the narrowest of voting margins.
The loss of a people’s democracy has happened many times in history. As far back as the B.C. years of the Roman Republic, there had been a constitutional government with an elected representative government. But in 27 B.C. Julius Caesar amassed enough power to disenfranchise the Roman Senate.
It was not for another 1,800 years that the world saw its second-ever constitutional democracy — the one that was declared in 1776 and ratified in the united colonies of America in 1789. In that same year, the French rebellion against the monarch and ruling class reached its violent climax, before disassembling into a series of monarch and emperor regimes that again came to bloody ends with the widespread rebellions across Europe from 1848-1851.
Today, all the European nations, Great Britain, former colonies of Africa, South America and Asia all have forms of democratic governments. Several are very young and frail. They are surrounded by authoritarian governments in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Sudan, Republic of Congo and elsewhere. In total, almost 40 percent of the world’s population lives in non-democratic countries.
There are no “full democracies” on the continents of Africa and South America, where individual liberties and a free press are suppressed.
Tocqueville’s historic challenge between a ruling class aristocracy — a tyranny of a minority — and a people’s republic devoted to equality — a tyranny of the majority — continues today.
Very soon the citizens of the oldest democracy in the world will be voting for new government leadership and for one of two sharply divided visions of democracy and tyranny.
Given a vote this Nov. 5, Tocqueville would likely follow his own words written near the conclusion of his classic book: “It is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.”
Sounds like another Never-Trump vote to me.
— Rollie Atkinson
8-25-2024
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Supposedly, Adele Stevenson responded to the suggestion that he would get the vote of every thinking person, stating, that unfortunately, he needed a majority.
I enjoy your thoughtful essays, but wonder at readership. Who is out here reading and thinking?
The issues you discuss reflect a stagnation of choice. Our leaders rig the game, allowing us to vote for the lesser evil instead of greater good. (Perhaps MS Harris will ….but the DNC and media don’t want change.)
No third parties or rank choice voting.
We’re both so old we’ll miss the excitement of sea level rise and capitalism “fixing” climate change.