Essay 20: Tocqueville on the Distinctiveness of American Federalism – Volume 1 Part 1 Chapter 8
Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner
The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 154 (starting at heading What Keeps The Federal System From Being Within Reach of All Peoples) – 161 of this edition of Democracy in America.
Tocqueville on the Distinctiveness of American Federalism (Democracy in America, Book I, ch. 8)
De Tocqueville’s discussion of “What Keeps the Federal System from Being within Reach of All Peoples” is a penetrating and challenging meditation on a certain kind of American exceptionalism. It is at once a tribute to the genius of the American Founders and to the enlightenment of the people for whom they legislated, and a profound appreciation of the serendipitous contribution of geography—America’s great distance from the European powers—to the success of their undertaking.
De Tocqueville identifies two vices inherent in every federal system—“the complication of the means it employs” and the “relative weakness” of the central (i.e., national, or as we say, federal) government. The first, he says, is “most visible,” while the second is “most fatal.”
The complexity has to do with the distribution of sovereignty between two levels of government, each operating directly on the people and each supreme within its limited sphere. This, De Tocqueville emphatically avers, is “conventional and artificial,” that is, not natural. What’s natural is for people to be governed by one source of power, to look to one capital as both the center of authority and the center of loyalty and affection. To undertake the careful discrimination between which government has authority to do what, to discern the limits of both state and federal government in their respective spheres, requires “a people long habituated to directing its affairs by itself, and in which political science has descended to the last ranks of society.”
Are we still capable of this? Our tendency to expect or seek national uniformity in legislation and policy, our impatience with the political and cultural diversity of the states, and our complaints about the “undemocratic” character of both the Senate and the Electoral College, certainly suggest that many of us have lost sight of the genius and subtlety of the original design.
De Tocqueville’s account of the weakness of the central government follows from what he believes about the naturalness of unitary government. Our national government is, he says, “a work of art,” the product of our constitutional design. For most of us, most of the time, it is a remote abstraction. On the other hand, “the sovereignty of the states in a way envelops each citizen… It takes charge of guaranteeing his property, his freedom, his life; at every moment it influences his well-being or his misery.” Indeed, he continues, this sovereignty depends on “all the things that render the instinct for one’s native country so powerful in the heart of man.”
To be sure, especially in times of international crisis, we need a strong central government, capable of defending us from adversaries. Our states by themselves are too small and too weak to meet the exigencies of such a moment. De Tocqueville describes an almost fateful choice between a weak government that leads to defeat and domination and a strong government that prevails only by becoming despotic.
It was America’s great fortune, he wrote in 1835, to have the Atlantic Ocean between it and the European powers, a natural defensive barrier that remedied the defects of a relatively weak central government and obviated the need for a strong one.
Now, we haven’t enjoyed this luxury since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Nuclear Age. Despite America’s status as a superpower, it remains vulnerable to other nuclear powers and to asymmetric threats (such as terrorism) from rogue states and non-governmental actors like al Qaeda and ISIS.
According to De Tocqueville’s prescient analysis, such a situation would seem to call for a strong central government, with its concurrent temptations to abuse and oppression, i.e., to despotism. We might then, in a sense, be forgiven for our own almost natural inclination to abandon federalism, paying attention to the federal government, rather than to the states.
But De Tocqueville’s argument suggests that we do so at our peril. As he argues elsewhere in Democracy in America (see, for example, Vol. I, ch. 5, on townships and on administrative decentralization), the scope of local and state politics matches both our imaginations and our concrete interests. The more distant and abstract those interests are (as in national policy matters), the less efficacious and engaged we tend to be, and the more abstract and ideological our positions tend to be. It would not surprise De Tocqueville at all for a largely national political scene to be dominated by hyper-ideological elites, which seems like an apt description of our current situation.
As I suggested at the outset, his remedy for this situation is to see to it that “political science [descends] to the last ranks of society,” so that we understand the vital role played by the states in our federal system. This is not just a matter of fidelity to a Constitution that has been in place for almost 240 years, but of informed allegiance to a political arrangement that engages our interest, protects our rights, and provides the basis for the kinds of political interactions where fellow citizens on opposite sides of an issue can work together to find a common ground.
Joseph M. Knippenberg is Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, GA, where he has taught since 1985.
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The reduced impact of the ‘relative weakness’ of the federal government is partially explained by geographical issues. America is far from Europe and therefore insulated from any warlike tendencies there. But look at the situation from the other direction. What are the benefits of America’s geographic characteristics. One is the aforementioned insulation from European (and other) conflicts and aggressiveness. But there is another major consideration. Most of America is flat, not more than a thousand feet above sea level. There are rivers navigable by large ships or barges over most of the continent. That provides two things. Economically it provided great advantages for both internal and international trade. Second, it prevented the various parts of the continent from being too isolated from one another, so we were not just in name ‘United’. Thomas Sowell has a good video discussing these same issues as they relate to the African continent. I recommend his video.