Entries by Jorne Gilbert

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Essay 45: De Tocqueville– “A Few Remarks On The Present Day State And The Probable Future Of The Three Races Which Live In The Territory Of The United States” (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 10, Subch. 2)

Alexis de Tocqueville uses his keen insights and talents for observation to focus on the question of slavery and blacks in the newly created United States of America.

Near the end of his essay on this topic he once again demonstrates the prescience and perception that he has revealed throughout the book “Democracy in America”. In this essay, he predicts slavery’s demise.

He explains at the end of the essay, “… whatever the efforts of Americans of the south to preserve slavery, they will not succeed at it forever….in the midst of the democratic freedom and enlightenment of our age [slavery] is not an institution that can endure.”

Indeed, slavery ended in the US. It proved incompatible with the remarkable ideas of our founders including the foundational principle that “All Men are Created Equal.” The end came about as the result of the most consequential war that this nation had ever experienced. Greater and more deadly for Americans than World War I and World War II. Certainly, greater than the losses of the Revolutionary War. The Civil War cost more American lives than any war the US has ever been involved in.

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Essay 44: De Tocqueville: “A Few Remarks On The Present Day State And The Probable Future Of The Three Races Which Live In The Territory Of The United States” (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 10, Subch. 1)

Democracy in America recounts Alexis de Tocqueville’s reflections on his extensive travels in America. In the chapter under discussion (Volume 1, Part Two, Chapter 10), he considers the present and probable futures of the three races [the white man, the Negro and the Indian] that inhabit the territory of the United States. De Tocqueville found the three races to be naturally distinct and inimical to each other. Fortune had gathered them together and mixed them without the ability to intermingle, to the end that each pursued its own destiny. My focus is De Tocqueville’s answer to the question, vis a vis the Indian, “What is to be the future of the Indians?” He saw it as bleak. Very bleak. To the point of extinction.

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Essay: 43 The Main Causes Which Tend To Maintain A Democratic Republic In The United States (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 9, Subch. 10)

Founding a democratic republican regime is one thing. The American founders had done that. Maintaining it is another, as Benjamin Franklin famously remarked upon emerging from the final session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and as a sober young American attorney named Abraham Lincoln saw and considered in his “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois in 1838, some two generations later.

Writing a couple of years before Lincoln, Alexis de Tocqueville understood that his fellow Europeans hesitated to found democratic republics because they did not see how such regimes could sustain themselves in Europe, where geopolitical, constitutional, and civil-social circumstances differed substantially from those prevailing in North America. By then, Americans faced no formidable enemies, needed to fight no major wars, and consequently afforded no opportunities for a native Napoleon to hunger for military glory and move against republicanism. The American capital was no Paris, no Rome; a centralized government can fall prey to mobs, with ‘the democracy’ threatening the government, whether monarchic, as in 1789 and again in 1848, or republican, as the Romans had seen in the military coup of Julius Caesar. And North America is much bigger than Europe; on a large continent, “nature itself works for the people,” giving them an outlet for their restless ambitions. Dissatisfied with your lot in life? If you’re an American, go West, young man; set yourself up as a farmer, not as a revolutionary.

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Essay 42: The Main Causes Which Tend To Maintain A Democratic Republic In The United States (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 9, Subch. 9)

The Way We Were (And Could Be Again)

“The Americans have no neighbors and consequently no great wars, financial crisis, ravages, or conquest to fear; they need neither large taxes, nor a numerous army, nor great generals; they have almost nothing to dread from a scourge more terrible for republics than all those things put together – military glory.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville

The late Ronald Reagan after losing his party’s nomination for president in 1976, spoke of a time capsule that he had the opportunity to write a letter for that would be later opened for the American Tricentennial 100 years later in 2076.

“And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now … will know whether we met our challenge,” Reagan explained. “Whether they will have the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.”

Reagan then went on to say:

“Will they look back with appreciation, and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later, free? Who kept our world from nuclear destruction? And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all, because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it. This is our challenge and this is why we were here in this hall tonight. Better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we’ve ever been but we carry the message they’re waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined, and what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.”

History both repeats and rhymes, and the challenge and battle that Reagan had spoke of for the soul and future of America is the same struggle that every American has been fighting since The Shot Heard Round The World on April 19, 1775 and maybe even earlier.

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Essay 41: The Main Causes Which Tend To Maintain A Democratic Republic In The United States (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 9, Subch. 8)

It is widely acknowledged that Democracy in America, written in 1835 and 1840, is the greatest book on that topic—a period of America long gone and never to return. De Tocqueville offers an optimistic chapter describing the forces working to preserve a democratic republic. Conjoining those two words obscures the traditional philosophical opposition between republics and democracies. In so doing, De Tocqueville offers several explanations that, while accurate for his time, are as dead as a dodo bird in ours.

His first explanation is that “The Americans have no neighbors and consequently no great wars,” except, of course, with themselves (the Civil War of 1861-1865 was at the time the bloodiest and most sophisticated war fought anywhere in the world). We still have quiet borders with our northern and southern neighbors (putting aside the problem of illegal immigration). But today, new technologies that span oceans call for military interactions with countless nations, both friend and foe—China, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and many others. Our current military budget, foreign policy, defense capabilities, intelligence sources, and foreign aid programs never crossed De Tocqueville’s mind. But to read him as a blind isolationist would draw exactly the wrong inference. Today, he would know that the question is not only whether to interact with these formidable world powers but also how to do so. Do we sign bilateral or multilateral treaties? Can we continue to follow a constitutional system that requires, except in emergencies, the Congress to declare war before the President as commander-in-chief can intervene in Kosovo or Libya? These all present tough issues. And if De Tocqueville was right to attack General Andrew Jackson when he ascended to the presidency, should we say the same about Dwight Eisenhower? Don’t blame De Tocqueville for not seeing the future. Don’t rely on him as if he did.

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