Modes of political behavior run along the grooves of the larger habits of the social organism. Call it culture, if you will. De Tocqueville, in his chapter on political eloquence in the United States, compares the European aristocratic mode to the  American democratic mode. Before we examine De Tocqueville’s discussion, two digressions.

Eloquence conventionally means “fluent or persuasive speaking” and is used today to indicate objective oratory talent. If now we say “The Congressman spoke eloquently” we tend to mean finely. But the origin of the word is the Latin “e” for out [as in “exit”] and “loqui” to speak. The French word is “éloquence”, and the English word is borrowed from this mother language. In French, “éloquence” can also mean raw loquacity and volubility. I take De Tocqueville’s meaning to be mainly the method of speaking out rather than the finer quality of it.

In the 1986 hit comedy “Back to School” the protagonist, Thornton Melon, fumbling for words to ask his professor — who at least sounds European — out on a date, says “Call me sometime when you have no class.” This joke is funny precisely because America, in its prohibition of titles of nobility, is, in more ways than one, a classless society. 

Few things show this more clearly than a common American method of fraud, which is to assume the air of European class structure to gain some advantage. A fine illustration of this comes from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. 

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