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April 7, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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TOCQUEVILLE’S AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep63
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This is a special edition of the podcast focusing on Tocqueville's democracy in America.
Why? Because the America that Tocqueville describes is precisely the America we're trying to conserve.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We're having a big political debate in this country.
We're having a big political debate in this country.
Well, I don't know if debate is the right term.
It seems more like a brawl.
But what is the brawl over?
What are we fighting about?
Well, we're fighting about America.
And the future of America.
But which future?
It sometimes seems like we are the party of America and the other side is anti-American.
We sometimes hear that rhetoric and I've used that rhetoric myself.
It's not entirely precise because it's not that we are for America and they are against America.
We really want And are fighting about two very different conceptions of America.
Now, a couple of years ago, maybe three or four years ago now, I debated Bill Ayers.
This is, yes, the former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the far leftist Bill Ayers, at Dartmouth College, and we were debating what's so great about America.
And you might expect that Bill Ayers would have taken the position, well, America's not great.
And he sort of did, but he did it in an interesting way.
What he said was, yes, America is great, but it's not your America, Dinesh.
It's not the things that you care about.
The founders, they weren't that great.
He said, oh, the guy who was really great was the...
The seminal leader, Osceola, who fought a guerrilla campaign against the U.S. government.
He goes, what's great about America is the anarchists, the anti-war protesters, the social activist Emma Goldman, the Iraq war press protesters, Cindy Sheehan.
So this was, I realized, Bill Ayers' America.
This is the America that he is excited about, and this is the America that he is patriotic about, and this is the America that he wants to foster.
So, it's almost like we have an America...
In our America is the America of Columbus and the 4th of July, of entrepreneurial innovation, a country founded on Christian beliefs, the America, you will, of the Boy Scouts, at least the old Boy Scouts, parochial schools, traditional families, flag saluting veterans.
So this is our America.
This is what we care about.
But the left has its America, as the Bill Ayers example shows.
Their America is the America of social entitlements, wealth redistribution, affirmative action, abortion, gay rights, transsexual rights, gay marriage.
This is the America that they want to foster.
Now, in thinking about our America, the America that we're fighting for, and of course we have Trump's slogan, Make America Great Again.
But what America is Trump talking about?
What is the America that we as conservatives are trying to conserve?
I've said before, and I say now, that it's the America of the founding.
It's the principles of the founding.
Obviously, the founding occurred 1776, the Declaration of Independence, 1789, the Constitution.
That was a different world.
America was then an agricultural country.
It's not as if we're directly trying to bring that back.
But what we are trying to bring back are the principles of the founding.
We're trying to make sure that those principles drive the America of the future.
So we are the champions, you might say, of American exceptionalism.
Exceptionalism, why? Because the founders believed that they were building a new country, a novus ordo seclorum, a new order for the ages.
And this was a, they conceded, an experiment.
Now... Interestingly, I want this podcast, I'm going to focus on one man, and oddly enough, he's a Frenchman.
We think of the French as being slightly foofy.
This is a non-foofy Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville.
I'm going to sort of Americanize his name.
Tocqueville! Interestingly, he's de Tocqueville, a little bit like I'm de Souza.
So here you've got these sort of visitors or outsiders who have come to America.
Tocqueville, of course, was a visitor.
He didn't emigrate here.
He actually spent only nine months in America.
He came in 1831, about May of 1831.
He stayed until 1832.
But in these nine months, he observed America.
Now, the key point about Tocqueville is he saw the America that the founders built.
Now, this is a key point because when we think back to the founders, we go, oh, the founders, obviously, the founders built America.
Yes, but the America of the founders, the America that the founders lived in, Wasn't there America?
Think about it. The founders lived in a world that had been shaped by the British, by British parliaments.
And that America, colonial America, you might say, had started really in the 17th century and continued for 150 years.
So the founders lived in somebody else's America.
In fact, they rebelled against that America.
They wanted to build a new America that would break with the British, that would depart from the colonial tradition.
A new America, you might say, inside of America.
Now, the founding itself was...
A charter, a blueprint.
You can almost think of it as an architectural blueprint for a building.
But the founding, apart from the act of revolution of breaking from the British, was essentially a parchment.
It was words. It was the creation of institutions.
But those institutions naturally would take time To play themselves out.
To create an actual new country.
And that new country took 40 or 50 years to build.
In other words, the Founders America only came into being.
The blueprints only generated the house.
Several decades later, and it so happened that by about 1830, this is by the way 40 years after the founding, along comes this non-foofy Frenchman, Tocqueville, with a very clinical detachment.
What I love about Tocqueville is he brings this outsider point of view.
But at the same time, he's sympathetic to America.
He doesn't take the, although descended from aristocrats, he doesn't take the haughty view, which you get from a lot of Frenchmen, who are the silly Americans.
No. Tocqueville's view is that there's something very exciting, something very important, something providential.
In fact, the future of the world is being made right here in America, and I am blessed, I am honored to be able to see it and describe it.
Interestingly now, Tocqueville is writing For the French, for his home country.
He's writing about America for other Frenchmen.
We've got to keep in mind his audience.
But amazingly, his book, Democracy in America, and I have it here, two volumes, just great.
This is volume two.
Here's volume one.
Must reading. Very important to get an idea of America, the kind of America that we're defending and trying to protect.
What Tocqueville does is he travels all around America.
I'll give a little bit more detail of where he went and who he saw.
We're going to dive into the different aspects of America that he saw and he described.
And we're going to ask the question, isn't that...
Isn't Tocqueville's America, the underlying principles of it, the life that Tocqueville saw, not just a blueprint, not just the Declaration of Independence of the Constitution, but, you may say, the Constitution in action, the Constitution as embedded in the lives of Americans, Tocqueville goes, here is an amazing, interesting society.
A society that's not only the society of the future, but one that will dominate the world.
Tocqueville was prophetic in seeing America become the world's sole superpower, an example to the world, a magnet for the world.
Tocqueville saw all that.
And as we dive into Tocqueville, we will see up close, and I think in a very illuminating way, The characteristics of American exceptionalism, that's the America we want to make, we want to recover to make America great again.
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Alexis de Tocqueville was only 25 years old when he, along with his buddy Beaumont, set out for America to discover what Tocqueville would later call a distinct species of mankind.
Now Tocqueville and Beaumont studied English to prepare for the journey.
They each bought a gun.
Beaumont apparently brought some sketchbooks and a flute.
And when they arrived in Rhode Island, there was a whole contingent of press waiting to greet them.
They would spend nine months in America.
They traveled, oh, 7,000 miles.
They went by stagecoach, by horseback, by steamer, by canoe.
They covered 17 of the then existing 24 states.
They started up in Boston.
They went through Green Bay, Wisconsin, up into Canada, down through New Orleans.
Then they ducked south.
They went from Montgomery to Norfolk to Washington, D.C. They also covered New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore.
So they saw a lot of America.
They met a lot of famous people.
They met a lot of ordinary people.
By the way, we had a nice section on Tocqueville in my movie America.
A movie you should see, by the way.
So, Tocqueville sees America and he's struck by the sort of entrepreneurial activity of the Americans.
Now, by the Americans, I have to say, Tocqueville really means white Americans.
Why? Because for him, as for many others, America was a virgin continent.
Now, I realize that today this is very controversial.
People say, what do you mean a virgin continent, Dinesh?
There were people who were already here.
What about the American Indians?
Well, here's what Tocqueville has to say.
The Indians occupied America without possessing it.
What he's saying here really is that the Indians were here, but they didn't develop the continent.
As Tocqueville says, they were there merely to wait until others came.
Tocqueville has a remarkable statement.
He goes, North America was discovered as if it had been kept in reserve by the deity and had just risen from beneath the waters of the deluge.
It's almost as if the world is starting all over again because here is this continent, and yes, there are people here, but...
Tocqueville never bought into the silliness that somehow, because the Indians were here first, they sort of own America.
Think of it. Does the first Bedouin who shows up at an oasis own the oasis?
Does he get the right to say to every subsequent Bedouin, you have to pay me if you want to drink water?
Or if you drink water and enrich yourself in this oasis, later your descendants are going to have to pay reparations to my descendants.
Think of the stupidity of this.
Well, Tocqueville will have none of it.
Now, what strikes him about America is the unbelievable resourcefulness, creativity, and energy of the Americans.
He goes, and he's not entirely positive about this.
He goes, Americans won't rest.
He goes, I'm quoting him, he goes, they are sad and way too serious even in their pleasures.
He goes, they have an inordinate affection for money.
But that all being said, Tocqueville says, they're always building things.
And no sooner they build one thing, they're onto something else.
Here's a really funny description talking about Americans trading at sea.
He goes, the American starts from Boston to purchase tea in China.
He arrives in Canton, stays there for a few days, and then returns.
In less than two years, he has sailed as far as the entire circumference of the globe, and has seen land but once.
In that voyage of eight to ten months, he has drunk brackish water, lived on salt meat.
He has been in a continual contest with the sea, with disease, with weariness.
But upon his return, he can sell a pound of tea for a half penny less than the English merchant, and his purpose is accomplished, and he starts doing it again.
Tocqueville talks about Americans.
He says, in Europe, you know, people Tocqueville do one thing all their life.
A guy's a saddler or a guy's a mason.
He goes, American? Oh no.
He's a mason on Monday and then he's a cowboy on Tuesday.
He's fixing something else on Wednesday.
He's inventing a new type of pipe or machine on Thursday.
So Tocqueville feels that this is the restless creativity that produces American abundance.
He even talks about the double migration of the Americans.
He goes, restless Europeans.
And he notes, it's sort of the restless Europeans that leave.
The kind of sluggish Europeans stay home.
And the restless Europeans do a migration to America.
And Tocqueville goes, most people would be kind of content with that.
You've already made a big migration.
But no, they land in America, they set up, and pretty soon they're ready for a second migration.
What's the second migration? Americans moving west from the East Coast to the Midwest, and then later all the way to the Pacific.
So basically this is...
A people who will not sit still.
Tocqueville says, So Tocqueville predicts In the 1830s, when America is an agricultural society, this society is going to go right up to the front of the line.
It's going to become, perhaps, the world's sole superpower.
It's going to become a magnet for the world.
It's going to become an example for the world.
And in this, Tocqueville turns out to be completely right.
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The core debates about our time focus on the issue of equality.
And equality is a central theme in Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
Now, equality is also the central principle of the Declaration of Independence.
All men are created equal.
Our equality of rights comes out of that.
And Tocqueville says right at the beginning of his great work, During my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people.
Now, what does Tocqueville mean by equality of condition?
Does he mean that in America you don't have rich and poor?
You don't have fast and slow.
You don't have smart and dull.
Not at all. He's not talking about that.
He's actually talking about social equality.
Equality of a very profound sense.
The idea that you don't have anything like superior or inferior people.
People in that sense are equal in being the same.
Here's a clip from the movie America that highlights this point.
Listen. Popeville observed how no one bows or scrapes before another in America.
America is the only country where we call the waiter, sir, as if he were a knight.
So there you go, they're all in the restaurant and it's all types of people.
Tocqueville isn't interested in homogenizing them, but his point is they're all equal in being there, in being arm-to-arm with each other.
Now, he gives an example where he talks about an aristocrat in France, Madame de Sivine, and she is talking about a peasant who is...
And she describes it, she's actually laughing as she describes it, Tocqueville says, which shows, according to Tocqueville, that...
So, from the point of view of this aristocrat, there are two types of human beings.
There are the superior types, like her...
And there are the inferior types whose lives don't matter.
But Tocqueville says it's not like that in America.
In America, in fact, he says you don't have peasants.
You have farmers. But farmer implies a dignity that the peasant doesn't have because peasant is always contrasted with some other higher superior being.
Tocqueville also says in America there are employees.
But there are no servants.
Now, I was very struck by this fact.
I mean, in many countries in the world, if a rich guy were to go into a slum in Bombay and say to the poor guy, hey, listen, I'll give you a hundred rupees if you kiss my feet, the guy would be like, great, I'll do it for ten.
But in America, you can't do this.
Bill Gates can't come to you and say, hey listen, I'll give you $50 if you kiss my feet.
You'll be like, take a hike.
You might be richer than me, Bill Gates, but you're not better than me.
This is what Tocqueville is getting at.
Tocqueville then turns the issue of equality to the issue of men and women.
And he has very striking things to say.
He says, men and women are equal, but they have completely different paths in life.
What he calls two clearly distinct lines of action, two pathways.
And he goes, it doesn't matter if families are rich or poor.
In the rich families and in the poor families, the man is sort of the man of the external world.
The man commands the outside space of the house, and the woman rules the roost.
And he says, you know, this may seem like some sort of oppression, but he goes, that's not the case.
He goes, this opinion, which you could call patriarchy or the division of labor, the division of roles, he goes, is not peculiar to one sex and contested by the other.
I have never observed that the women of America consider conjugal authority, male authority, as a usurpation of their rights or that they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it.
It appeared to me, on the contrary, they attach a sort of pride.
To the voluntary surrender of their own will.
So now the key word here is voluntary.
Because Tocqueville's point is that unlike in Europe, where marriages are largely arranged, in America, not just that the couple decides, But he points out slyly, the woman decides.
He says the man is attracted to the woman, but the woman chooses the man that she wants to be married to.
But once she chooses, he says, she submits to male authority.
And in fact, he describes in a very poignant way the life of the pioneer wife.
I want to read a couple of lines because it's a hard life.
He goes, The pioneer's wife plucked from the innocent cradle of her youth in an instant and with no hope of returning has exchanged the attractions of society and the pleasures of her own home for the isolation of the forests.
Privation, suffering, and boredom have affected her vulnerable constitution but have not felled her courage.
Amid the profound sadness depicted upon her delicate features, we discern a religious resignation, a deep peace, and some kind of quiet and natural determination which confronts the tribulations of life without fear and with acceptance." So you can see here that Tocqueville actually admires what can almost be called the manly determination and manly courage of the American woman.
He says this. He says that women, in a sense, have the delicate features of women.
They have the ornate clothing of women, but they have the hearts of men.
And they need it because in the forest, you may say, while building a new settlement, It takes tremendous determination and courage.
You have to sort of submit your life to it.
Finally, Tocqueville talks a little bit about books.
And he goes, Americans are equal in books.
You know why? Because they don't have any.
He goes, By and large, all the books have to come from London.
But he goes, Americans, even ordinary Americans, aspire to read books.
He goes, there's hardly a pioneer's hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.
I remember I read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
So, Tocqueville's point is Americans want to learn.
They want to read. Now, when Tocqueville talks about equality, we should be really clear, he's talking about the equality of whites.
He's not talking about, he recognizes completely that this equality is not extended to what he calls the red man or the black man.
Later Tocqueville will do, and I'll talk about it, in what he calls the essay on the three races of America.
And we'll get to that.
But here what Tocqueville is saying is that, at least among whites and at least in principle, you have this idea that no human being is superior or inferior.
This is what he means by the idea of equality.
And I think we have it in America today.
This is the equality that we should be concerned about.
The idea that every human being has dignity.
We're equal in that respect.
We're not equal in other respects.
And so the left's manic desire to produce other forms of equality, I think Tocqueville would have recognized as a perversion and ultimately not a form of justice, but a form of using the slogan of equality to promote social injustice.
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I've been talking about two features of American exceptionalism that Tocqueville highlights.
The first one is the entrepreneurialism, vitality, and creativity of America and Americans.
And the second is an attachment to the idea of social equality.
No one is better or worse, superior or inferior.
I now turn to another key aspect that Tocqueville noticed, and this is the role of Christianity.
The role of Christianity, which he says, pervades every aspect of American life.
Kind of a contrast, if you will, with today when the left, you know, despises Christianity.
Now, it's wrong to say some people think that the left is anti-religious.
No, not really anti-religious.
They don't seem to have any problem with Islam.
They're even kind of friendly to the illiberalism of radical Islam.
But when it comes to Christianity, they take a completely different and markedly more hostile tone.
And let's remember that the left's attack on Christianity isn't merely theological.
They don't like the morality of Christianity.
They don't like the idea of the Ten Commandments.
They don't like the strictures about homosexuality, for example.
So they want to eradicate not really so much Christian theology.
Think of it, Biden is like, I'm fine with Christian theology.
I just don't like the church's teaching on pro-life and other issues.
Now, Tocqueville was a Catholic, and Tocqueville saw in Europe a very different kind of Christianity.
The typical clergyman for Tocqueville was some kind of a bishop in a purple robe, a bishop who was friendly with aristocrats and showed up at court.
In America, Tocqueville sees that Christianity is like among the people.
You show up to see a pastor and you find him with his parishioners and he's like digging a ditch.
He's part of ordinary life.
Here's a little clip from America which shows the The sense in which Christianity in America is just part of the routine lives of ordinary Americans.
Watch. Tocqueville witnessed the importance of Christianity.
He saw faith shaping not only people's inner life, but also their political life.
He wrote, religion must be regarded as the first of their political institutions.
So, Tocqueville makes the observation that in America, there are innumerable sects.
I think as a Catholic, he's struck by this kind of multiplicity of Protestant and even some kind of eccentric types of belief.
But he goes, even though you've got all these different sects and they all have kind of their own innovations in theology, he goes, at the same time, they all have the same morality.
They all teach the same, if you will, commandments.
And so... Tocqueville says it is this common morality that unites Americans.
In religion. Now, he makes a remarkable statement, which is that religion is the first of America's political institutions.
I think this requires a little bit of explanation, because we don't think of religion necessarily as inherently political.
But Tocqueville says religion motivates Americans to do good deeds.
It drives their projects for reform.
The anti-slavery movement is driven by religion.
the movement for temperance is driven by religion.
So religion becomes a kind of activator of the soul, says Tocqueville, and causes people not just to put their eyes on the next world.
This was, of course, the great critique of religion by Marx and others.
Religion makes you ignore this life, it makes you just wait for the next life.
No, Tocqueville says, for Americans, religion activates you in this life to improve things for yourself and for others.
He also says that while capitalism or free markets focuses on self-interest, religion orients you toward other people.
It teaches you altruism.
It teaches you charity.
It teaches you love and neighborliness.
So, in a sense, what Tocqueville is saying is that religion counterbalances the self or inward-drawing impulses of capitalism, and that's a very healthy balance for a society.
You need capitalist innovation, but you also need religion to teach you, not only to teach you about To teach you that if you do make a whole lot of money, that comes with certain responsibilities and opportunities for charity.
In the end, I think Tocqueville would be probably a little stunned to see the way in which Christianity is under attack, under siege in America.
He didn't foresee, because in his time, religion and Christianity was so omnipresent in America, so enmeshed in the ordinary lives of people, I don't think he anticipated the rise of not just unbelief, or, because even in Tocqueville's France,
there were people who didn't go to church, they didn't practice, But a kind of political attack on Christianity, one that would seek to uproot the influence of Christianity from American life and create what the left seems to want now in America, a thoroughly secular society.
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One of the central debates in our society now is about the role of government.
Not whether to have a government but what should the government do and what is expected for citizens to do.
Now this is a topic that is of great interest to Tocqueville and he takes it up.
He describes it as the issue of associations.
Everywhere Tocqueville goes in America he sees And by associations he means just groups of people who come together to do something.
It could be to clear a creek.
It could be to pave a road.
It could be to build a house for someone whose house has fallen down.
It could be philanthropic.
It could be charitable.
It could be entrepreneurial.
But what Tocqueville says is that in other countries, and particularly in France, These things are not done by citizens.
They're done by great lords or they're done by a centralized state.
France, of course, has been known to have a centralized state going back to the days of Louis XIV and even before.
And France, of course, has a pretty centralized state today.
So Tocqueville is struck by the contrast by this centralized approach to government and what he sees as the voluntary combinations of individuals acting in concert as a team.
Here is Tocqueville.
He says, In the United States, associations are established to promote the public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion.
There's no end which the human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society.
Here's a short clip from America, the movie America, showing how this combination of effort produces charitable results.
Listen. When a private individual meditates an undertaking, he never thinks of soliciting the cooperation of the government.
Rather, he does it himself or in collaboration with others.
In the end, the sum of these private undertakings far exceeds all that the government could have done.
you Now, Tocqueville says that in Europe, the state does all this.
The state takes over, if you will, the issue of charity.
But he says that in America, he goes, quote, there is no, at least, or at least it does not appear to be, any government at all.
No central idea of whatever seems to regulate the movement of the machine.
By the machine here, Tocqueville means society.
So society is functioning sort of outside of government.
Tocqueville sees not only no centralized government, he doesn't see any government whatsoever.
Now, Tocqueville does realize that, and he sees this particularly in New England, that there is active local government, but the local government that impresses him is the government of the New England town meeting.
It's in fact not even representative democracy.
This isn't just a board of aldermen or state representatives who come together, all 12 of them, and make decisions.
No. The New England town meeting is open.
It's held in a church.
It's held in a kind of public house, almost sometimes even in a tavern.
And people show up and they talk about issues of importance.
They make decisions.
They egg on their representatives.
They cheer. They jeer.
And Tocqueville sees this as participatory democracy.
But the important thing, participatory democracy at the local level.
And the local level is important for Tocqueville because it's people dealing with their own problems.
You don't have a bunch of people in Washington, D.C. saying, this is how it ought to be in Oregon.
This is how it ought to be in Savannah.
In fact, why consider that the problems of Oregon and Savannah would even be the same?
So Tocqueville is applying here actually an old Catholic principle.
It's called the principle of subsidiarity.
And the basic idea is this...
Try to solve a problem yourself, on your own as an individual.
If you can't, find a bunch of other people like you, with a common interest or common values, and you solve it together.
If you can't solve it, even as a group, voluntarily, go to your local government.
And if your local government can't do it, then go to the state government.
And if the state government can't do it then, but only then, you turn to the federal government.
So the point is that the central government is the government of last resort.
And Tocqueville sees this as part of the variety, the true diversity, and also the true meaning of democracy in action in America.
Now, I mention all this because it contrasts so starkly with the left today.
They don't like voluntary associations.
In fact, they do their best to undermine voluntary associations.
Why? So our attachment will be to the centralized state.
They don't even like local self-government, and they certainly don't like states' rights.
Now, they say, oh, states' rights is just an alibi for oppression, for slavery, and so on.
Well, it was that under the Democratic Party.
States' rights long preceded the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party made it into a weapon for defending segregation and oppression.
So, states' rights had nothing to do with oppression until the Democratic Party came along.
The bottom line of it is we see here with Tocqueville highlighting not just of entrepreneurship, not just of Christianity, the role of faith, but here the role of private associations and local participatory democracy.
As an alternative to the rule by some kind of all-powerful centralized state, the kind that Tocqueville saw at the French court, or the kind that we increasingly see now in Biden's America.
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We now turn to the topic of race, a topic that...
Tocqueville is obsessively the topic of America today, but it was also a big topic in Tocqueville's America.
But before I get to race, I want to make one more point about associations I was talking about in the last segment.
Tocqueville talks about how he says, quote, It's simply that of virtue introduced to the political world.
So for Tocqueville, this is the connection between Christianity or theology and politics.
Rights, he said, aren't just secular.
The idea of rights is connected to the idea of right and wrong.
It's the idea of virtue introduced to the political world.
At one point, Tocqueville is confronting a group of champions of temperance.
And he goes, He goes, I did not at once perceive why these temperate citizens could not content themselves with drinking water by their own firesides.
So Tocqueville sees this movement, we're gonna stop drinking liquor!
And Tocqueville goes, well, do it!
Why are you creating this big hoo-ha about it?
But then Tocqueville realizes, you know what?
This is to create a public example.
In other words, people here are not going to the law.
They're not trying to outlaw liquor.
They're trying through their combined example to say to people, hey, excessive drinking can have very bad effects.
So these public vowels have a sort of civic purpose.
Let's turn to Tocqueville's essay.
It's called The Present and Probable Future Condition of the Three Races that Inhabit the United States.
And he means, of course, the white man, he also talks about the black man, and the red man.
And he makes a couple of striking observations that I think are worth noting.
One is, he says...
The condition of the blacks and the condition of the Negroes, as he calls them, are, he says, the opposite.
He goes, these two groups, although we kind of lump them together, they're both today minorities, if you will.
But Tocqueville goes, in a sense, their tragedy is of an opposite nature.
And here's how he puts it. He goes, the Indian does not want to be part of America.
By America he means white America.
He doesn't want the white man's civilization.
But the white man is somehow trying to force him to be part of it.
The white man is trying to impose civilization on an unwilling group of natives, if you will.
He goes, for the black man, for the Negro, the Negro wants full integration into American society.
The Negro wants the benefits, if you will, of American and Western civilization, but the white man won't let him.
So the Negro, in a sense, is being kept out, according to Tocqueville, but the American Indian who wants out is being forced in.
Now, Tocqueville sees this whole race issue as a real tragedy and he makes the point that he says that it is always a good thing historically when somehow a more barbarian nation conquers a more advanced nation.
He goes, it's better if a ruder group of people, like the Mongols, Barbarian conquerors are more advanced people like the Romans.
Why? Or like the Europeans.
Why? Because he says when a barbarian people conquers, they can sort of accept the superior civilization of the people they've conquered and adapt to their ways.
He goes, but if the barbarian, if the conquerors feel that they are superior culturally, intellectually, as well as in force...
This produces tremendous arrogance on the part of the conqueror and degradation on the part of the conquered.
And he goes, this is basically what's happened in the United States.
The Europeans who are conquering both the natives and the Africans, they feel, they believe they are civilizationally superior and they also have force at their disposal.
So this for Tocqueville is the tragedy of race in America.
So Tocqueville does not turn his eye away from all this.
At one point he's talking about slavery, and he makes kind of a profound point about slavery.
He's standing at a point where you've got Ohio to the north of him and Kentucky to the south of him.
Now, Ohio is free country, Kentucky is slave country, and Tocqueville notices that there's a huge difference.
Listen. At one point, Tocqueville stood on the Ohio-Kentucky border.
He looked north and he saw industrious Ohio.
He looked south and he saw idle Kentucky.
On both sides, he commented, the soil is equally fertile, the situation just as favorable.
So what explained the difference?
Slavery, Tocqueville said, degrades work.
It produces a people without energy, without a spirit of enterprise.
Slaves have no incentive to work, because they don't get to keep the fruit of their labor.
And masters become lazy because there are slaves to do everything for them.
We're going to sell them here because they're ready to work.
We're going to start this auction off with this strapping young buck right here.
So what Tocqueville is getting at here is that slavery is the degradation.
And it's the degradation of the whole society of Kentucky.
It affects the slaves, of course, but it also affects the masters.
If it makes the slaves lazy, because why should they work?
They're not being paid to work. It makes the masters lazy, because why should they work?
The slaves are there to do it for them.
Ultimately, Tocqueville, he doesn't say much about the Democratic Party as the party of slavery.
This was the 1830s.
Of course, Andrew Jackson had just been elected a couple of years earlier, 1828.
So the Democratic Party was just becoming the party of the plantation.
But Tocqueville notices the plantation mentality.
And I think if Tocqueville were alive today, he would see that that plantation mentality, far from being extinguished, Certainly far from transferring to the Republican Party, the big switch, bugaboo, no.
This plantation mentality is still here in America, except the Democratic Party now wants to impose at least a certain form of servitude, not just on the blacks, but on all of us.
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I've been talking about how Tocqueville...
Describes and in many ways celebrates the principles of American uniqueness, of American exceptionalism, from entrepreneurship to innovation, the impact of Christianity, the idea of social equality and equal dignity.
And also the idea of doing things voluntarily, turning to the government only as a last resort.
But now we want to turn to Tocqueville's warning.
Because Tocqueville thinks that America faces a great danger, and it's a danger that I think is now upon us.
It's the danger of what Tocqueville calls soft despotism.
Soft despotism.
It's remarkable that in 1830, 1831, Tocqueville could see so far out that he could see this coming.
For Tocqueville, this despotism arises not because democracy is giving way to authoritarianism or giving way to monarchy.
Not at all. The despotism is particularly insidious because it comes out of democracy itself.
Here's a way to think about it.
Democracy is based on the idea of majority rule.
But where does the majority get the right to rule?
Let's just say we have a group of ten people.
Why should six people, just because they are six, tell the other four what to do?
Is it just because the six are more?
They're stronger? So are we now submitting to a law in which might is right?
Because the six are more and have greater, let's just say, muscle power, they get to wrestle the other four to the ground?
No. The idea of democracy is based on the idea that the six, even though the majority, need to have their power curtailed, limited.
There have to be protections for the four, which is minority rights.
So the founders knew all this, and the founders worried about what they call tyranny of the majority.
And here is where Tocqueville really takes off.
He says the danger of democracy comes from the tyranny of the majority.
Here's Tocqueville in his usual mode where he rises above the pedestrian and reaches the profound.
He goes, unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing.
He says, human beings are not competent to exercise it with discretion.
God alone can be omnipotent.
Why? Because His wisdom and His justice are always equal to His power.
He goes, but for human beings, whenever you have all power concentrated in one, it's bad.
He goes, it's bad when we call it...
A monarchy, when one person rules.
He goes, it's bad when we call it an aristocracy, when a few people rule.
But he goes, it is equally bad when we call it a democracy, when the majority rules or tyrannizes over the minority.
The founders called it tyranny of the majority.
Tocqueville remarkably calls it tyranny of the laws.
Tyranny of the laws.
And here's Tocqueville.
He goes, what is the guarantee against the majority in the United States?
He goes, public opinion forms the majority.
The legislature represents and obeys the majority.
So does the executive.
The military is the majority under arms.
The jury is the majority issuing decrees.
So basically what Tocqueville is saying is that tyranny doesn't have to be the tyranny of one man.
It can be the tyranny of the people.
Or by the people here, he means the largest faction of the people despotically ruling over a smaller faction.
Now, what is the effect of this so-called soft despotism?
I want to read Tocqueville here because it has to do with the majority doing this through the centralized state.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power which takes upon itself alone to secure the gratifications and to watch over the fate of the people.
That power is absolute, minute, regular.
It would be like the authority of a parent.
If, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood.
So it'd be one thing if this despotism was, listen, it's temporary, you're going to become an adult and you can then rule yourself.
No. He goes, but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep people in perpetual childhood.
For their happiness, such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness.
It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property.
What Tocqueville says is the government here is trying to do what?
He goes, it's trying to spare us the care of thinking and the trouble of living.
Now, he says the people gain a sort of independence from this soft despotism when?
On election day, he goes, the people sort of take their power back for one day.
So for one day, every two years or four years, people get their power back.
But he goes, they hold it just long enough to release it again.
So he goes, by the system, the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master.
And then relapse into it again.
So Tocqueville here is saying that by contrast with the participatory direct democracy of the New England town meeting, the centralized state does not consult the people.
It rules over them, for them, if you will, but it rules despotically.
And when Tocqueville uses the phrase soft despotism, by the way, soft here doesn't mean despotism.
That the despotism is like marshmallow tyranny, not at all.
What he means is it's despotism that is concealed.
It's despotism that is traveling under the banner of freedom.
So Tocqueville here is a champion of freedom.
But what he's saying is that the greatest threat to freedom comes from democracy itself, comes from the tyranny of the majority, comes from the people.
Obviously not all the people, but some people, arrogating power to themselves and in the name of the people, tyrannizing over other people.
So democracy here becomes a shibboleth, a justification for the arbitrary exercise of power.
I think a prophetic warning very relevant to our own day.
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At least as time permits, into Tocqueville's classic work, Democracy in America, a work written following Tocqueville's nine-month journey in America, but one that still has very powerful echoes and resonances for us today.
It defines the contours of American exceptionalism.
It lays out the America that we're fighting for.
It shows that when we want to make America great again, these are the principles The principles of subsidiarity, of voluntary associations, of local self-government, of innovation, entrepreneurship, a revival of faith and family, a revival of a difference between the sexes, a simple recognition that the two sexes are not identical.
All of this is right there in Tocqueville.
Now, I want to talk in this concluding segment about Tocqueville's other book, because many people don't realize, well, Tocqueville did a bunch of other things.
In fact, even his travel accounts weren't limited to America.
He went to England, he went to Sicily, he wrote about Italy, he wrote about...
England, but his work on America, of course, is his most famous.
But there's one other book by Tocqueville that is well worth reading, and it's called The Ancien Regime, The Old Regime, and The French Revolution.
This is Tocqueville's thoughts about what's going on in France, and I want to single out just one idea in that book, because it runs counter to To the sort of idea that we have gotten now from Marx and so many people on the left, the idea that revolution is created by people who are impoverished.
According to Marx, once oppression gets bad enough, once the proletariat or the working class is immiserated beyond a certain point, they can't take it anymore and they begin to revolt.
Now, of course, This turns out to be Marxist claptrap.
No working class anywhere in the world has revolted in this way.
Not from Marxist day to this day.
So Tocqueville, in looking at France and looking at the French Revolution and looking at its aftermath, says he noticed something very interesting.
The things leading up to the revolution were not getting worse.
Tocqueville says they were actually getting better.
What you had is a rise of material conditions and the poor and the ordinary guy began to see that they had things now they didn't have before.
But, says Tocqueville, even though their material condition was improving, Their expectations outstripped their material gains.
So their material gains might have been from 1 to 5, but their expectations were all the way to 10.
And it's the distance between their achievements and their expectations that produces discontent.
They become angry that they don't have more.
They suddenly begin to believe that things that other people have are theirs by right.
They feel, in a word, entitled.
I think this is a very important insight for our own day.
When I see a lot of these Black Lives Matter types, these Antifa types, these raging discontented leftists on campus, they're often extremely well fed.
They're well clothed.
They drive nice cars.
They live in mom's basement.
Many of them don't even work.
And yet they're extremely angry.
They're angry not because they're impoverished.
This is not some kind of immiserated working class.
These are the spoiled brats.
And the language of revolution comes very easily to these spoiled brats.
Why? Because somehow, with all the stuff they have, they believe that they are now crusaders.
Not just for others, but also for themselves.
Why can't I get free college?
Why can't I get this and why can't I get that?
I own a cell phone, but recently I just saw Jim Acosta.
Why can't I? We need to have Biden's infrastructure plan because I want to take the Acela fast train and have Wi-Fi from New York to Washington.
So here you've got this chubby-faced, grown-up brat, Acosta.
And I don't begrudge him wanting to go on a fast train.
I just begrudge him wanting you and me, who are not on that train, to pay for his ticket.
Why doesn't this guy who's making a decent salary pay for himself?
So here's Tocqueville's point that what breeds discontent is not poverty, but actually a relatively well-fed but discontented guy who's miserable not because he doesn't have enough, but because he is perpetually wanting more and wanting more very often, at least in the case of the left, at the expense of someone else.
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