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 298 (bottom half of page) – 302 (top half of page) of this edition of Democracy in America.

WHAT AMERICAN DEMOCRACY MEANS FOR EUROPE

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.

Europeans enjoyed none of these advantages. Politically, they enabled the American Founders to constitute their national government as a federation, not a centralized state. Their strong township institutions, established long before the founding, had taught the people “the art of being free,” habits of mind and heart consistent with self-government. Americans had anchored their civil and criminal courts in the counties, close to the people, who could be confident that they would be judged by their peers.

Most importantly, American hearts were animated by the principles of a “democratic and republican” religion. As De Tocqueville had earlier maintained, the first movement toward equality of condition was in Christianity itself, its teaching of human equality before God. At the same time, American minds were enlightened by an education that was eminently practical, with the ‘Three Rs’ enabling citizens to read their Bibles for moral guidance, to read their newspapers for political information and for expressing their own opinions, and to calculate sums correctly in business.

In all, “American legislators had come, not without success, to oppose the idea of rights to sentiments of envy; to the continuous movements of the political world, the immobility of religious morality; the experience of the people, to its political ignorance, and its habit of business, to the enthusiasm of its desires.” It was true that Americans confronted one potentially ruinous dilemma absent from Europe: race-based slavery, the theme of the final section of De Tocqueville’s first volume—one distinct from the problem of the overall civil-social equality, the democracy, in America. Europeans, however, faced the reverse problem: no slavery, but no obvious solution to the questions raised by democracy.

On that front, Europeans enjoyed none of the advantages Americans enjoyed. Democracy was advancing in their societies with the weakening of the aristocracies. But democracy, social and civic equality, need not issue in republicanism, in the protection of natural and civil rights. Napoleon had demonstrated this, only a quarter-century before De Tocqueville ventured to the United States. “The organization and establishment of democracy among Christians is the great political problem of our time.” Indeed, “the question I have raised interests not only the United States, but the entire world; not one nation, but all men.”

Why? Under the civil-social condition of modernity, democracy, with no aristocrats standing between the people and the centralized state, one could not only see a monarchy along the lines of France under Louis XIV, but a new absolutism, a new despotism “with features unknown to our fathers.” The old absolutist monarchies retained a still-formidable aristocratic class. Firstborn sons inherited the estate, ruling but also protecting the peasants who worked their land, as their ancestors had done for centuries. Second-bord sons entered the clerical aristocracy, the Roman Catholic Church exerting influence on peasants, monarchs, and their fellow aristocrats alike Under the old regime, wealthy merchants in cities and townships also commanded their own sources of revenue and manpower independent of monarchs and aristocrats. Even under the rule of the Bourbons, then, there was “a love of freedom in souls” among honor-loving aristocrats and aristocrats and commerce-loving merchant. The peasants and urban workers ruled by these elites nonetheless understood that they, too, could one day see the face of God, that they too partook of the dignity of human being.

But in the European civil-social democracy of De Tocqueville’s century, the Enlightenment philosophes and their intellectual heirs had undermined faith in God; “nothing any longer sustains man above himself.” And democratic men find themselves in a leveled society in which all classes mix together, and “the individual disappears more and more into the crowd,” readily “lost in the midst of the common obscurity,” and therefore no longer held responsible for his actions.

 “When each citizen, being equally powerless, equally poor, equally isolated, can only oppose his individual weakness to the organized force of the government,” a regime of despotism would take on the harshness of late Roman imperialism, “those frightful centuries of Roman tyranny, when mores were corrupt, memories effaced, habits destroyed, opinions wavering, and freedom, chased out of the laws, no longer knew where to take refuge to find an asylum; when nothing any longer stood guarantee for citizens and citizens no longer stood guarantee for themselves,” where “one would see men make sport of human nature.”

In the event, many Europeans would come under tyrannies even worse than De Tocqueville foresaw, regimes in which making sport of human nature meant hunting it down in death camps and world wars, resulting in tens of millions dead, regimes where the modern state, armed with technologies permitting surveillance of its subjects, ended civil and political liberty for those who survived the onslaught, spurring the invention of a new word, ‘totalitarianism.’

“Is this not worth thinking about? If men had to arrive, in effect, at the point where it would be necessary to make them all free or all slaves, all equal in rights or all deprived of rights; if those who governed societies were reduced to this alternative of gradually raising the crowd up to themselves or of letting all citizens fall below the level of humanity, would this not be enough to overcome many doubts, to reassure consciences well, and to prepare each to make great sacrifice readily?” For “if one does not in time succeed in founding the peaceful empire of the greatest number among us,” democratic republics instead of democratic despotisms, “we shall arrive sooner or later at the unlimited power of one alone.”

Against atheist ideologies, therefore, De Tocqueville called upon Europeans to renew their respect for Christianity. Against overweening military and political ambition, he commended a spirit of peaceful commerce, of the ‘bourgeois’ life detested by aristocrats and socialists alike. Against the “sentiments of envy” he opposed the idea of individual and civil rights. Against governmental centralization, federalism and the practical experience local self-government provides to citizens. Against the threat of foreign wars, a strong executive, a constitutional monarch empowered to defend the realm. And against the alienation of his fellow aristocrats, De Tocqueville urged a policy not futile dreaming of reinstituting command but of guiding democracy, moderating its passions by teaching it how better to govern—as De Tocqueville himself did, in writing Democracy in America.

Will Morrisey is the author of ten books, including studies of the political thought of the American founders, the American Progressives, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Shakespeare’s comedies. He has been an editor of Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy for 45 years. He retired from the Politics Department at Hillsdale College in 2015. His articles and reviews may be found on “Will Morrisey Reviews.”

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