Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age

5. Democracy Watch 2011

I wrote the first draft of this chapter—a snapshot of democracy in 2011—on December 17, 2011, the first anniversary of the day Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian, set himself on fire in front of a government building in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid in desperate protest against the mistreatment he reportedly suffered from police for illegally selling fruits and vegetables. [270] Bouazzi would die from his burns eighteen days later on January 4, 2011. His action is credited with sparking the Tunisian “Jasmine Revolution” and more generally the “Arab Spring”—a series of revolutionary uprisings throughout the Middle East that have led to regime change in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Other protest movements against authoritarian regimes, notably in Syria, are in progress. Thanks to the Internet, I can “Google” Mr. Bouazizi, read an extensive profile of him on Wikipedia, view footage of the day’s commemoration that was broadcast on France’s TF1 evening news channel, [271] or watch an “infographe” posted on the website of France’s daily newspaper Le Monde by a photo journalist who visited Sidi Bouzid to do a follow-up story one year after Mr. Bouazizi’s immolation. [272] Or click on any of the hundreds of other links my Google search has generated for me.

On December 25, 2010, Kevin Boyle, an internationally known lawyer, political activist, and “voice for human rights,” died of cancer in England at age sixty-seven. Born in Newry, County Down, one of nine children of a Northern Irish Catholic taxi driver, Kevin Boyle studied, practiced, and taught law for thirty years in Galway, Ireland, and later at the University of Essex in England. He was active in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement and went on to defend vulnerable individuals and groups suffering human rights abuses, notably in Turkey, Russia, and South Africa, in trials that contributed significantly to the development of international human rights law. He first came to international prominence on July 19, 1989, with the launch of the world statement in defense of Salman Rushdie—a declaration signed by many famous writers and academics who united to oppose the death threats and official fatwa against Rushdie issued by Ayatollah Khomeini earlier that year in the wake of the publication of Rushdie’s controversial book The Satanic Verses (1988). [273] On September 11, 2001, Kevin Boyle began a new job as a close collaborator with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. He also wrote and edited many books, including Article 19 World Report (1988), Introducing Democracy (1995, with David Beetham, discussed above), and Human Rights and Democracy—The Role of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt (edited with Adel Omar Sherif, 1996). I don’t know if Kevin Boyle took note of Mohamed Bouazizi’s act of protest during his own last difficult days. His widow, Joan Boyle, told me she wasn’t sure. It’s a pity in any case that neither man lived long enough to witness the struggle for and against democracy and human rights that ignited in 2011.

On December 5, 2011, parliamentary elections were held in Russia. These elections were marred by allegations of fraud, and these charges—some of which are backed up by video clips uploaded to websites such as Youtube [274] —triggered protests, notably the large assembly in Moscow on December 10, 2011. [275] Many observers now wonder if Putin’s Russia will also undergo Middle Eastern–style regime change sometime in the near future. [276] On December 17, 2011, Ellen Barry reported that Russian president Dmitri Medvedev would like to see his and Putin’s United Russia Party take the lead in reforming the model of the Russian state, which Medvedev said had “exhausted itself.” But it is uncertain how much power or influence Medvedev will have since Putin took over again as president in 2012. [277]

On December 15, 2011, the former French president and former mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, was convicted of embezzlement and misuse of public funds to finance his political party by having created fictitious municipal jobs during his tenure as mayor. The court ruled that “Jacques Chirac breached the duty of trust that weighs on public officials charged with caring for public funds or property, in contempt of the general interest of Parisians.” [278] He received a two-year suspended sentence. The crimes for which he was convicted date back to the early 1990s, but he had exercised his right to immunity, granted by the French Constitution, during his twelve years as president. From 1995 to 2007 he served two terms, first seven years, then five (due to a term-length change in the Constitution). Two days later, his Wikipedia page had already been updated to take into account this first-ever, “historic” conviction of a French president of the Fifth Republic. On December 16, 2011, Le Monde quoted an excerpt from a text read by the former president’s lawyer on his behalf in which Jacques Chirac comments on the significance of his trial. [279]

If the concept were explained, would Jacques Chirac—or any French person—accept “accountability” as the most proper translation for “responsabilité” in the above quotation instead of “responsibility”? It all depends perhaps on whether one accepts that the French notion of responsabilité contains, besides the standard notion of “to be in charge,” the future-oriented notion of “to be held accountable” and therefore “possibly subject to punishment for wrongdoing if the official account of what happened as decided upon in court so demonstrates”—the latter notion being much more clearly and distinctly accounted for by the English term accountability, for which there exists no French equivalent. If he would, then a possible translation of Jacques Chirac’s statement could be this:

The journalist comments in a concluding sentence, “These words sounded right [sonnaient juste] in a trial that had become, suddenly, yes, historic.” This declaration, including the avoidance of the word trial in favor of the euphemistic rendez-vous, can be seen as a modest effort to conserve a certain grandeur, with a small “g,” for the former president who decided in the same spirit of self-denial (i.e., sacrifice of his own self-interest in favor of the broader interest of the health of France, its judicial system, and democracy in general) to not exercise his right to appeal the court’s decision.

The irony that several observers did not fail to underline in the wake of the court’s decision was that given the more relaxed mœurs of ten or twenty years ago in the area of political corruption, [280] Jacques Chirac might not have been convicted at all had he not exercised his right to immunity back in 1999. Others disagree, pointing to the conviction in 2007 of his associate Alain Juppé (named France’s Foreign Affairs minister in 2011) in the same affair. [281] The Chirac-Juppé affair raises the question of evolving visions of justice and judicial procedure as mœurs in a particular context change over time. And then there are the complications that arise when mœurs are significantly different in one context versus another at a given time—something the former director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, learned from scandals surrounding his actions in a hotel in New York in May 2011 and other places in France. [282]

Different continent, different news. On December 15, 2011, the New York Times featured this headline in the attention-getting upper-left corner of its website: “U.S. Marks End to 9-Year War, Leaving an Uncertain Iraq.” Reporter Tim Arango summed up Thursday’s big story in America with this paragraph:

Meetings to discuss who was responsible (i.e., in charge) and questions about who, if anyone, will be held accountable for this protracted, costly, and inconclusive war are ongoing, though mostly in the media and on some university campuses, not in the streets or the courts. [283] To date, for example, no civilian has been convicted of any crime in relation to the torture scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or in relation to allegations of misconduct and illegal actions at other detention facilities since 2001. Detailed and abundantly footnoted accounts of this scandal and of the Iraq War can be found on Wikipedia and in the writings of New Yorker magazine contributors Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer. [284]

Arango summarized the state of Iraq at the moment of the U.S. pullout with these words:

The question everyone is asking is whether now, without the authority of Saddam Hussein or the authority of the armed forces of the United States, the different groups that compose Iraqi society are willing and able to live together and share power. “We should finally get some answers about the future for democracy in the Arab world now that U.S. troops have left Iraq,” said Middle East specialist Thomas Friedman in his audit-editorial published less than one week after the U.S. pullout on December 20, 2011. [285]

“A country that is not exactly at war, and not exactly at peace” is also an apt description of Egypt during the weekend of the first anniversary of the Tunisia uprising. On December 17, 2011, the top story in the Middle East for the New York Times was not the first anniversary of Mohamed Bouazizi dousing himself with paint thinner and setting himself on fire, but instead the latest outbreak of violence in Cairo surrounding the controversial parliamentary election process and popular opposition to the military’s choice of Kamal Ganzouri as interim prime minister, an illegitimate choice for many Egyptians due to this politician’s ties to former Egyptian president Hosni Moubarak, who was forced from power on February 11, 2011. [286] David Kirkpatrick summarizes the grotesque absurdity of the situation in his opening sentence.

One does not need to be on drugs to view the world with “kaleidoscope eyes” these days; indeed, one could say that arranging as best one can an ever-changing selection of breaking news fragments has become the habit of all those who are trying in good faith to keep up with what appears to be an accelerating, decentralized, interconnected and disconnected, multipolar and yet polarized world. But as with drugs, this type of news gathering can induce dizziness, fever, and fatigue; and it’s tempting to respond by either tuning out completely or by delegating the task to one news sifter—the American Family Association, Fox News, MSNBC, the New York Times, Slate, Arts and Letters Daily (a sifter of sifters sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education), France 24, Al Jazeera, etc.— or to one set of “friends” whose ideology, values, or take on the world one more or less agrees with and let them tell you what you should think about everything. [287] “It’s the attention economy, stupid”—something Tocqueville noticed early on would be of critical importance to relatively weak, insecure, overworked citizens in democratic times.

Of course “friends” written with scare quotes has become a standard way to allude to Facebook’s “democratized” social network. [288] Launched in 2004, Facebook has more members today than any other country in the world except India and China—over 800 million as of December 2011. I mention it because the fictionalized movie version of its founding, The Social Network (2010), was released on DVD on January 11, 2011, just three days before the resignation and departure of Tunisian president Ben Ali, and one month before the resignation of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The DVD grossed over $13 million in its first week, and the worldwide total gross for the film is roughly $225 million. [289] With Facebook, the sublime of large numbers is everywhere. Facebook, along with other social networking sites powered by the Internet, cell phones, and multifunction smart phones, is commonly credited with playing a crucial role in the events of the “Arab Spring.” New technologies are also commonly thought to have played an important role in the subsequent “Occupy” movements around the world that sprang up in 2011 in imitation of the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the winter and spring of 2011, which resumed with more violence in November and December of 2011 as noted above. [290] Certainly, for now, the violence and stalled reforms of the Arab Spring recall more the crackdown of the 1968 “Prague Spring” than they do the more or less peaceful 1989 “Velvet Revolution” led by Vaclav Havel, who died on December 18, 2011. [291] Velvet is not the texture that comes to mind when one thinks of the political turmoil that raged across the Middle East between December 2010 and December 2011.

And then there’s the Euro crisis. On December 15, 2011, while others may have been thinking about Jacques Chirac, Iraq, or something else, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s replacement as of June 2011 and one of only two women (the other being a high-end prostitute) to appear in the documentary film Inside Job (2010), gave a speech at the U.S. State Department in which she warned that the world faced a 1930s-style economic slump if further international cooperation to solve the crisis did not happen soon. [292] Lagarde avoided using the D-word, but others such as Paul Krugman have said, “It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression.” [293] What’s more, some Europeans, many Catholic-influenced Italians, for example, seemed oddly accepting of the harsh austerity medicine that will soon take effect in the form of higher taxes and lower government services and pensions. [294] Atonement for sins widely shared was the way it has been presented by the post-Berlusconi government of Mario Monti in December 2011, even though many (notably in the “Indignant” and “Occupy” protests) reject this blame-the-public narrative and claim instead that the crisis is a top-down disaster that resulted from wrongheaded policies forcibly imposed by ideologically blinded elites; e.g., the “Bush tax cuts” for the wealthy, the war of choice in Iraq, financial deregulation, and the creation of a common currency, the Euro, without common mores, rules, or principles, such as accountability, to cushion the shocks inherent in capitalism and insure member-countries’ long-term probity and credit-worthiness. [295] Viewed from Zuccotti Park or Tahrir Square, it almost looks as though the Euro crisis exists to neutralize the Arab Spring and other grassroots movements in rich or poor countries—pushing them off the front pages, out of sight, out of mind—and that if it didn’t exist, it would have had to be invented. Is there any truth to that conspiracy theory?

If we have a moral obligation to be intelligent, we have to ask what all these events mean and how they are related, besides being nearly simultaneous. Many have compared 2011 to 1848, a year Tocqueville knew well, and for that and many other reasons it might be worth looking to the “elegant Norman” for some help. [296]

6. Democracy and the New Dignity

One way of trying to make sense of the events discussed in the preceding chapter is to interpret them in light of Tocqueville’s study of democracy, especially his compare and contrast analysis of the mores of aristocratic and democratic times. So what do those events have to do with Tocqueville and democracy? Directly it would seem not a lot. There have been only scant references to Tocqueville in discussions of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movements, and other “revolutionary” events of 2011. This is a pity, since the escalation of protest in Tunisia, Egypt, and Zuccotti Park receives at least a partial explanation if one remembers the “Tocqueville effect,” or “Tocqueville Paradox” as Jon Elster calls it (162–169)—also known as “the theory of rising expectations.” Simply stated, it’s the idea that one becomes both more desirous for something—e.g., equality, freedom, dignity—as one gets small first doses of it, and less tolerant of doing without it. Although he had sketched this idea in Democracy in America (DA II, 2, 3), the more memorable formulation comes in Book Three, Chapter Four, of The Old Regime and the Revolution (Elster, 164).

In 2011 the Internet was abuzz with self-congratulations about the more level playing field (or battlefield) offered by the savvy use of social media sites, laptops, and cell phones that allegedly permitted more efficient organization, mobilization, and execution of protests. Only a few commentators of the Arab Spring made the observation that these protests may have been triggered in part by marginally better living conditions and moderately higher equality that large numbers of both populations had experienced under the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes. [298] The relatively more favorable economic conditions and more liberal political situation in comparison with the greater misery within recent memory, combined with the yawning chasm between those still generally paltry living conditions and the opulence of ruling elites in the Arab world, makes the situation rather similar to what Tocqueville describes in the France of Louis XIV to Louis XVI, or, we might add, to Honnecker’s German Democratic Republic and the whole Soviet Bloc at the dawn of the Internet age around 1988. But except for the occasional Tocqueville sauce epigraph (most often without a precise reference), his sociological observations have so far not been enlisted to help understand the Arab Spring or Occupy movements, whether to expand or suppress them. [299] Clearly scholarly voices like Boyle, Elster, Heimonet, and Wolin have not gotten through. If only Gene Sharp had told his many followers to download Tocqueville!

As for “democracy,” which has had an image problem going back over two thousand years, not just two hundred, there have been many references to it, but it has taken a backseat to other more pressing concerns—jobs and dignity especially. This is partly understandable, especially in the Middle East that has no large-scale economic activities to support a middle class besides the oil industry and tourism. [300] It should be clear by now that democracy is viewed with ambivalence by many leaders and ordinary citizens—and not just in the Middle East. Republicans—in the U.S., France, and elsewhere—generally favor oligarchy and plutocracy and actively oppose most attempts to introduce more horizontally organized institutions and practices that would welcome and value the presence and input of ordinary people in any decision-making process or collective action. Others, though professing democratic sympathies, often prefer managed, white collar, paternalistic democracy (“Brussels knows best”) and have hardly any more respect or patience for ordinary contributions than do their Republican counterparts. Both highly credentialed groups generally mock the idea of the “wisdom of crowds” and deride the political involvement of ordinary people as “populism,” “mob rule,” or “socialism,” “fascism,” or “communism”—depending on who’s listening. [301]

Many people who have never known anything but power pyramids with rigidly hierarchical and static economic and political institutions may be deeply skeptical of democracy as well. Theirs is a radical doubt that doesn’t question democracy comparatively—Democracy brand x versus Alternative regime y—on, say, criteria of sustainability, productivity, or other short- and long-term costs and benefits. Instead of arguing, they fundamentally doubt popular sovereignty from the get-go. They no more believe in democracy than they believe in Santa Claus. “Seven billion people governing themselves? Not in a million years!” Others may be honestly undecided about democracy but firmly believe that it’s not a priority at the moment, and therefore they push it down lower on their “To Do” list somewhere between “Solve global warming” and “Floss teeth.” Or else democracy seems to them like an unreliable, superfluous luxury. [302] Or too wasteful and slow given the enormity and urgency of present-day global emergencies. [303] The excuses, always called reasons, are endless. For them, democracy can and must wait. A dream deferred.

All of these views that set democracy aside—whether motivated by cynical power grabs, argued skepticism, paralyzing ambivalence, or total incomprehension and unfamiliarity—are flawed, and yet somewhat understandable in certain circumstances. Again, look at the Middle East. The twenty-three-year-old national motto used throughout the reign of Ben Ali, “Liberté, Ordre, Justice,” was replaced not by “Liberté, Égalité, Démocratie” but by “Travail, Liberté, Dignité Nationale” (Work, Liberty, National Dignity). Liberty is retained in the new motto, but it moves to second place, after Work, and functions as the bridge linking Work and National Dignity. The contrast with the former motto of Ben Ali’s dictatorship, which had unsurprisingly placed Order in the central position, is stark. But this new motto with its insistence on the concrete primacy of Work before Freedom and Dignity is also strikingly different from the more abstract French revolutionary motto (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité) and from the similarly vague conclusion to the American Pledge of Allegiance with its affirmation of “Liberty and Justice for all.” Despite their vagueness, however, the words fraternity and all in these two slogans evoke the sort of social glue that is supposed to unite people in those societies, namely brotherly love and shared freedoms and fairness. Those who put forward the new Tunisian motto—a fundamental exercise in rebranding, let it be said—clearly wanted to go for something more directly graspable. The primacy of assuring one’s basic material needs—food, shelter, clothing, health, and education—through “decent work” [304] is understandably uppermost in the minds of millions of poor, unemployed, undernourished, undereducated Tunisians, Egyptians, and “Occupy” protesters throughout the world. Alongside the material benefit of allowing one to secure the basic needs for survival, meaningful work is the cornerstone of the basic spiritual need for dignity, something that Tocqueville and other inheritors of humanist and Enlightenment values came to consider natural to the human species (DA I, 2, 5, 292).

But why “National dignity”? Excess nationalist fervor in the twentieth century in particular has led many to be immediately leery of nationalism and patriotism in all their forms. And Tocqueville had already pointed out that patriotism based on the mere accident of one’s birth or upbringing in a particular location—“Proud to be a Mainer”—is strained and phony if it’s not undergirded by freely contracted collaborative projects between the state and the citizen in which general public interests (clean air, good roads, quality schools) overlap with particular private ones (my health, my commute, my mind)—the famous “win-win” incentive. Time will tell if there are dark shadows behind Tunisia’s choice, but the third element in its new motto may simply be articulating—perhaps imperfectly—another basic spiritual need, which is to belong and to feel a part of the group project of a team, band, party, or cooperative. What’s true for signs is true for people as well. No one is totally self-reliant. We don’t establish or retain worth (dignity comes from the Latin dignus = worthy) entirely on our own, but through the recognition, the acknowledgment, the respect or love of others, usually close collaborators, whether in running a business, a family, a city, or a nation. [305] Acquiring, maintaining, building, or restoring dignity, like all value creation, happens in society (including online), and it matters little whether my dignity is inscribed within the social context of a city, town, family, tribe, school, church, state, nation, or website. Judt got it right when he essentially repeated Adam Ferguson’s affirmation about the primacy of groups (Civil Society, 10) by recalling that “what is truly distinctive about modern life is not the unattached individual. It is society” (Ill, 215). There must be others to ignite the “communal spirit” between citizens who are equal in their “inalienable” human rights, to which lately has been added the right to dignity. [306] It’s understandable, therefore, that Dignité, not Démocratie, was nominated in December 2011 by the French journalist Didier Pourquery as the word of the year.

The importance of dignity in 2011 had in fact already been declared fundamental back in late January in an eloquent and compassionate editorial by New York Times columnist David Brooks, who rather uncharacteristically channeled his inner Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X to comment on “the power of the bottom-up quest for dignity” sweeping through the Arab world:

Brooks’s main claim is that dignity has gained more dignity in the post-1945 and certainly the post-1989 era, even though it’s unclear from his account how “the quest for dignity” could produce “a remarkable democratic wave” given what he calls the “freedom recession” with “more governments retreating from democracy than advancing toward it.” Nevertheless, Brooks vividly captures this universal quest for dignity (and maybe for democracy) with the novel image that people “mentally bumped themselves up to first class.” [308] There have been a lot of man-made events in the last twenty years that would tend to support what Brooks says, though they are obscured in his retelling behind fanciful images and water metaphors like “wave” and “tide.” It is also worth noting Brooks’s warning, à la Gene Sharp, that “while the public hunger for dignity is unabated, the road from authoritarianism to democracy is rocky and perilous.” The rocky road image is hardly original, but the point being made is hard to disagree with: democracy is definitely not built in a day, a year, or even a decade—nor can it survive without regular exercise and experimentation. The piece also takes a few jabs at the absurdity and fudging of the “tardy” response to the Egyptian revolution by President Obama and his foreign affairs team (which in the Libyan conflict the White House would spin as “leading from behind”), but it recovers its dignity at the end with a concluding recommendation: “If you start with a healthy respect for the quest for dignity, if you see autocracies as fragile and democratic revolts as opportunities, then you’ll find it much easier to anticipate events.” Tocqueville could not have put it better.

But the similarity between Brooks and Tocqueville does not end there. Nine months later, in an editorial on the Occupy Wall Street movement (“The Milquetoast Radicals,” October 10, 2011), Brooks roundly dismisses the demands expressed by some of his fellow Americans for more dignity and fairness and less arrogance and inequality. He shows little sympathy or respect for their quest for dignity, little ability to see the now famous “1%” as a powerful but fragile autocracy propped up by willing lawmakers who rewrote the U.S. tax code and pushed through deregulation of the banking industry to allow them to become much richer much faster than anyone else. [309] Nor does he seem to see the Occupy Wall Street movement as a legitimate revolt designed to combat the attack on dignity that is aggravated by the increasingly extreme inequality that has gripped America over the past forty years. [310] Brooks concludes that piece with an unproven claim and a zinger: “It’s not about declaring war on some nefarious elite. It’s about changing behavior from top to bottom. Let’s occupy ourselves.” Such “gotcha!” moments have become common in the Internet age which is also the age of snark. [311]

In the middle of the piece Brooks writes, “If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being cheated by the richest and greediest 1 percent.” This is a spurious claim. To my knowledge, OWS protestors never claimed that the rich are all “nefarious” and “greedy,” only that they could afford to pay more in taxes and that extreme inequality is wrong because unfair, and wrongheaded because economically counterproductive. [312] Nor do I think the OWS crowd thought of themselves as necessarily virtuous—whatever that means—but that they were decent, hardworking Americans who were getting screwed by an entirely legal but immoral economic, political, and judicial system—a view not very different from Tocqueville’s assessment of the way blacks, Indians, and women were being legally mistreated in the 1830s. In any case, this piece and its tart conclusion are more in keeping with Brooks’s usual “moderate Republican” stance. The quip “Let’s occupy ourselves” is saying “You, Buster, would be better off studying to get into a good college, landing a character-building summer job, getting some marketable skills… And stop complaining!” [313] Incidentally, this is also the message that Barack Obama heard as a boy in Indonesia from his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Dreams from My Father, Chapter Two).

Of course the classic “bootstrap” argument and “blame the victim” tactics of both American conservatives and France’s “meritocracy” apologists on both the Left and the Right are hardly new, but they are less persuasive today when unemployment among college graduates in Europe and North America is higher than ever, the purchasing power of most salaried workers of all ages has stagnated for years, American student debt is through the roof, and median American household assets have fallen by 40%. [314] Thus it was child’s play for Paul Krugman to nail Brooks, whom he refers to via an anonymous plural “pundits,” in a follow-up editorial on November 3, 2011, “Oligarchy, American Style.” The irony is that Krugman’s conclusion to this piece could have been written by Brooks himself so long as he were writing about faraway Egyptians, sheiks, and emirs.

The point I want to make is that Krugman’s correction of Brooks’s blindness to the merits of the Occupy Wall Street movement—merits that more and more people can see for themselves without being a Nobel Laureate in economics [316] —has other historic parallels. It’s sometimes said that Tocqueville had an easier time praising democracy when it was happening in far-off America, but when it risked coming in all its unwashed hurly-burly ways to his own backyard in 1848 he was less enthusiastic. Especially if it took the form of socialism, which for Tocqueville was not true democracy, but merely inverted aristocracy. In Tocqueville’s eyes, socialism would be a nightmarish Mardi Gras of role reversal between masters and servants extended to all seven days of the week, 365 days a year. For Tocqueville, socialists like Louis Blanqui or Pierre-Joseph Proudon were not community organizing democrats but self-righteous extremists prone to arrogant feelings of superiority and divisive moralizing. The socialist seemed to share the smug certitude of the aristocrat and a similar willingness to take and use other people’s money, but in a grotesque, farcical, impromptu way that underscored its arbitrariness and questionable legitimacy. Right or wrong about the intentions and motives of socialists (Taking or making? Predators or producers?), Tocqueville’s aversion to the specter of socialism and to the revolutionary lyricism of a Lamartine dampened French interest in Tocqueville for over a century. During that time the charge of bad faith and hypocrisy was leveled at the “elegant Norman” for his opposition to Paris workers’ demands in the “June days” of 1848 and his acquiescence to an alliance among the various wealthier classes to which he belonged that would allow Louis Napoleon to gain power and squash the quest for work, liberty, and dignity of wage laborers. In June 1848, an estimated 6,500 revolutionaries were killed or executed; another 11,000 were jailed or sent to Algeria. [317]

Reduced to its simplest terms, Tocqueville (or his ghost at least) paid a high price—a century of the silent treatment by most of his countrymen, not just “Marxists”—for seeming to praise democracy in America from his study but impede its advance in France during his ten years as a politician. For the Right (including most of his family members), Tocqueville was faulted for being too sympathetic to the demos; for the Left, he was never sympathetic enough, especially in hard times. Others, though more admiring of him in general, have difficulty reconciling Tocqueville’s many insights about regimes that are quite far from his own in space or time (nineteenth-century America, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France) with what seems to be a lack of feeling and vision in the local circumstances in which he wielded some political influence during the 1840s. However, given the forgetfulness and spontaneous generosity of many people living in later democratic times, David Brooks is unlikely to suffer the same fate; and some may even remember the January “Quest for Dignity” column where the better angels of his nature were singing and pardon his reactionary October column against OWS.

As for Tocqueville, I dare say most Americans paid little attention to his hypocrisy (if that’s the right word) in 1848, or in 1893 when the somewhat self-incriminating testimony of the Souvenirs was published, and so they experienced little cause for resentment that would lead them to resist reading Tocqueville. However, as Paul de Man pointed out in the area of literary criticism, a double-stranded rhetoric of “blindness and insight” can weave its way into a variety of contexts, sometimes quite unexpectedly. It could be that Tocqueville’s limitations as a politician made him realize finally that Democracy in America could not be read as a straightforward how-to manual (a sort of Democracy for Dummies), even though he may have fooled himself for awhile into believing it could. Those lost illusions may have then allowed him to see beyond the limited, static accounts of the Old Regime and the Revolution that his own study of those times—so strikingly sensitive to the unique and evolving conditions constituted by multiple variables—would surpass. The blindness, then, would have been a sort of midwife of the insight.

In the American context, it is generally acknowledged now that a contradiction between generosity abroad and harsh behavior at home has taken place several times in the country’s history. Aside from the glaring nineteenth-century example of the practice of slavery in a country that proclaimed all men are created equal, there is the early-twentieth-century example of wishing “to make the world safe for democracy” during World War I while denying basic rights to American employees who were trapped within the harsh, undemocratic world of the companies for which they worked—in effect autocratic states within the supposedly democratic United States. The grotesque injustice of this contradiction spurred on the Progressive Era and New Deal that resulted in laws that would push back against industry’s efforts to flout the more democratic mores that were becoming the new normal outside the factory gates.

More recently, the progressive era known as “the Sixties” took advantage of the Cold War strategy “to contain Soviet aggression” to ask when America’s elected officials and judges were going to step in to contain white America’s aggression toward African Americans, male American aggression toward women, or straight America’s aggression toward the nonstraight. These and other civil rights movements, for greater religious tolerance, for example, included demands for equal dignity and all that goes with it, even if freedom and equality were the dominant watchwords then and not dignity”

More recently still, after 9/11 (and then two wars and a banking disaster, massive recession, double-digit unemployment, worsening statistics on poverty and inequality, and the somewhat disappointing performance of the much vaunted first African American president), Americans seem finally to be getting past “Why do they hate us?” and coming around to consider the idea that maybe there is something wrong with what happens on Wall Street—which is of course not an excuse to try and blow it up as was attempted in 1920, 1993, and 2001. But this newfound insight, sharpened by attention-getting facts (inequality in America is comparable to what it is in Argentina and worse than in Tunisia and Egypt [318] ) and slogans (“We are the ninety-nine percent”), has led many to decide that Wall Street does need to be "occupied" by people with values different from the aggressively predatory and unegalitarian culture subscribed to by the majority of the deciders who have worked in New York’s financial district for the past forty years. [319]

In December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi said in effect, “You have robbed me of my freedom, my dignity, my right to work; you have crushed me like a ball of paper. Alright, if I am a ball of paper, then I will light myself on fire.” It was a radical strategy for reclaiming his dignity from his own ashes, a gambit that cost him his life but turned him into a national hero and international symbol. There were several copycat immolations in the days and weeks that followed Bouazizi’s dignity-seeking act of indignation. None of the OWS protestors has gone that far, but they too are trying to reclaim their dignity from the ashes of their dreams that have been incinerated by unemployment, mounting debt, lost savings, lost homes, and what they consider to be mostly deaf media and undignified, derelict politicians and judges. Some are claiming, others just hoping, that 2011 marks the beginning of a new Progressive Era to push back against the abuses and excesses of the past forty years and renew a commitment to protect the universal human right to dignity. [320]

There are only five references to dignity in the nine hundred pages of Democracy in America. Democracy’s emergence out of expanded equality of social conditions is Tocqueville’s main topic, not dignity. Nevertheless, these five references are worth noting since the necessity of conserving “the natural dignity of the human species” would seem to be a central concern for him, even if it does not receive lengthy explicit development. Dignity and justice are part of the new grandeur of a democratic regime. These two values compensate for the diminution of old-style grandeur that is the inevitable consequence of turning away from the paradigm of the hierarchically organized aristocratic regime.

The reference to dignity cited above comes at the end of a paragraph from DA I, 2, 5, where Tocqueville pauses in his discussion of “public officials under the control of American democracy” to express his indignation at the unfeeling arrogance of French magistrates as compared to the “natural style in the government of democracy,” which he prefers.

This is the second occurrence of dignité, which comes after a first use of the term in relation to the early Indians whose imperturbable aristocratic-like independence and dignity Tocqueville admires. [322] He points out that this is a consequence of a high degree of equality among them, a fact that contrasts with the inequality and hierarchy in civilized countries.

The key claim in this passage is that loss of dignity, which manifests itself as coarseness (grossièreté), results from unequal conditions and despair at “seeing no way to restore equality.” The portrait of the “common people” Tocqueville gives here is complex, comprising both indignant anger toward others and self-doubt about one’s own worth—and it rings true with the testimonies one hears from oppressed groups and victims in many contexts where dignity is violated or denied in both material and immaterial ways. [323]

A third reference to dignity occurs in the important tenth chapter of Volume Two, Part One, “Why Americans Devote Themselves More to the Practical Applications of Science than to the Theory.” Here Tocqueville conducts one of his masterful compare and contrast analyses of the strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs of democracy and aristocracy. If in democratic times dignity is more widely felt, “in aristocratic times, vast ideas of the dignity, power, and grandeur of man are widely entertained”—among the aristocrats themselves, it must be stressed, since in their eyes they are the only true men.

From the perspective of the aristocrat, to be less than the best—less than an aristoi—is to be less than a man. [324] Nevertheless, if dignity in democratic times is more widely experienced, and the “family of man” therefore a less exclusive club, it is often acquired with difficulty, and its maintenance in a world of change, insecurity, and middling talents and energies is a constant struggle—whereas for the superior-feeling aristocrat, it comes with the territory so to speak, and remaining dignified is hardly more difficult than breathing.

The fourth reference to dignity comes in a later chapter on manners where Tocqueville takes pains to show that American manners may not look dignified from an aristocratic perspective, but they have their own sort of homespun, middling dignity that is basically decent despite possible flashes of haughtiness, vulgarity, and unsteadiness due to the democrat’s lack of poise and destabilizing self-doubt about his worth and worthiness.

This is a good example of Tocqueville’s core belief that expanding equality of social conditions lowers the high and raises the low and expands the moderate middle. Cast negatively, i.e., from the aristocratic point of view, this evolution lacks dignity in the sense of grandeur, but viewed democratically, it gains dignity in the sense of decency—a key democratic term of praise. The middle might be less grand or even mediocre, but it is not base and thus conserves a decent amount of dignity.

Tocqueville comes out squarely in favor of this new democratic dignity as decency in the second to last chapter of the whole book, where the best way of defending dignity and independence, he asserts, is by proclaiming oneself to be a friend of equality and actually behaving like one. This recommendation comes at the end of an important paragraph that begins with one of Tocqueville’s firmest declarations that looking backward at supreme dignity, grandeur, and absolute power as they existed in aristocratic times is vain and futile. As a reminder to despots still holding on to exclusive power today, as well as to their allies and sympathizers, it is worth citing the whole paragraph and the short ones that frame it.

This passage, which includes the fifth and final reference to dignity, serves to clarify once more several of Tocqueville’s key positions. First, it should be noted that he does not advocate a retreat from equality as a way to prevent or reduce the likelihood of despotism. Absolute despotism is more likely under conditions of equality, it’s true, but that eventuality should be combated in other ways than by reverting to unegalitarian policies and principles. Second, it is still rather odd that Tocqueville again explains the state of equality as God’s decree (or “providential” as he wrote in the Introduction) since throughout the two volumes he has been alluding to specific geohistoric conditions, man-made customs and habits, and policy decisions (e.g., the elimination of entail) that each incrementally expanded the equality of social conditions among Americans and many Europeans and reinforced egalitarian thinking. Moreover, it’s presumably because equality can recede—God’s decree disobeyed, justice swept aside—that we need to be “friends of equality,” i.e., supporting it as sense and sensibility dictate, and presumably combating any return to extreme inequality.

Therefore, because equality of social conditions may be reversed (1830s appearances and a seven-hundred-year-old trend notwithstanding), it is worth befriending and defending equality on the grounds of what a more or less egalitarian society makes possible—the “real advantages” of democracy (DA I, 2, 6) that are summarized here as “to create or secure the independence and dignity of their fellow men” (and presumably, one day, of women and minorities). In short, independence and dignity, for which equality is a necessary condition, are what Tocqueville is proposing as checks against the establishment of “an absolute and despotic government,” which, alas, equality also makes it easier to establish.

But it should also be stressed again that the liberty and dignity that Tocqueville speaks of here are not the same species that would exist in aristocratic regimes. Democratic dignity is more a modicum of decency than high refinement; democratic liberty is more law-abiding entrepreneurship and collaborative experimentation than infinite romantic genius, revolutionary individual virtuosity, or unadorned lawlessness. More Ford, less Faust; more Amundsen than Scott, more Emerson than Thoreau, more Whig than wigged out. One may be left free to break the law, but knowing one may be held accountable. [325] Tocqueville summarizes his defense of the moderate middle two paragraphs later.

In other words, Tocqueville would perfectly understand and perhaps even share in Thoreau’s disdain for the achievement of the Egyptian pyramids, which are a monument to the absolute domination of the Few over the Many. [326] (Walden, Chapter One).

However, as we shall see in the next chapter, Tocqueville also recognized the salutary effects of tolerating and even encouraging the “sphere of individual independence,” “freedom of the intellect” (DA II, 1, 2, 19, G493), and the conservation or restoration of all those tendencies that are not native, so to speak, to a particular regime. In the case of a democracy—a predominantly risk-averse regime of savers, not saviors—these would include the promotion of the arts, the public display of fine art, and the study of Latin and Greek and the other non–vocationally oriented disciplines known as the “humanities.” But equally important would be the open-ended tolerance in everyday life, enforced by the U.S. Bill of Rights, for example, for indocility, eccentricity, principled civil disobedience, and above all free speech and association. Other “aristocratic” checks on the possible despotism that an egalitarian (and therefore conservative- and conformist-leaning) democratic government might engender include a nosy, indocile free press and free or low-cost institutions: voting, jury duty, libraries, schools, museums, parks, the post office, and today Internet access. Other aristocratic touches he favored, all of which act as “auxiliary precautions” (Federalist #51) to ward off the bad governance, corruption, and possible tyranny of the majority, include an independent judiciary, a bicameral legislature with longer terms in office for one of the two chambers, decent wages and working conditions for government employees, and the veto power of the president. In general, Tocqueville admired the encroachment-preventing apportionment of qualified independence and general dignity among the three branches of the American federal government and between the states and the national government. This can be seen from his sympathetic borrowings from both The Federalist Papers and from the writings of Jefferson that are closer to the “Spirit of ’76”—notably his quip about the despotism of a crowd being no less distasteful than the despotism of a single person. [327]

The crucial point of the Tocqueville passage cited above (the opening to the second to last chapter of Democracy in America, where, after nine hundred pages, the author has a last shot to achieve clarity and closure) is that independence and dignity are two of “the principal attributes of humanity.” And if humanity is to be defined as all men and women (the demos, and not confined to the grand few, the aristoi), then creating and securing those principles is more likely in times of equality. But it is also at great risk in those same times, and therefore care must be taken to encourage the “manly and legitimate passion for equality” and check the undignified, humiliating, or as he says “depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom” (DA I, 1, 3, 115, G60). If that could be achieved, then the liberty and dignity of a democratic regime could—at least now and then, fugitively to borrow Wolin’s term—be as grand as or greater than that of an aristocratic or republican regime. It’s worth repeating that for Tocqueville democracy was not just a form of government; it was a way of life that resulted in a new man. Whether this new man (and woman) is absolutely better is probably undecidable since there would not seem to be any sufficiently external perspective from which to weigh and compare the mores of the inhabitants within different regimes. Therefore, without caving in completely to “cultural relativism” and “anything goes,” we can say that the merits and demerits of more or less inclusiveness (or exclusion) within more or less horizontally (or vertically) organized institutions and regimes may be something that well-informed, reasonable individuals and peoples ought to debate and may on various points politely disagree about.

7. What Would Tocqueville Do? Some Policy Recommendations for Democrats and Dictators

But can we be sure that the new dignity is a sign of democracy’s triumph in the post–Cold War Internet age? What if this new dignity were not a sign of democracy’s victory but of its defeat? It should be remembered, for example, that many people view the affirmative action and multiculturalism drives of the 1970s and ’80s not as new social strengths that have their origins in the liberation movements of the sixties, but as admissions of failure (to integrate and involve others around defining and advancing common goals)—failures that display themselves in the tactical maneuvering of “identity politics,” special pleading for “diversity,” quotas, and the like. [328] A similar discrepancy between appearances and realities, theory and practical outcomes, is noted by the critics of organized labor who attack the successes of labor unions by pointing to cases of abuse or by making unproven blanket statements such as unions are bad for business, make the labor market too rigid, tie the hands of management, etc.—oddly forgetting that pushing back against the overly free hand of management was the whole purpose of unions to begin with, just as affirmative action and multiculturalism were generally considered to be necessary steps to break the undemocratic white male lock on economic opportunity and political power that existed in twentieth-century America until the 1970s, even if each in time generated its own set of problems (e.g., reverse discrimination and sectarianism).

So what about dignity? Might all the high-minded dignity talk of the last twenty years actually be a symptom of today’s phony, cynical democracy-lite as described by Wolin? In other words, is dignity talk a bone thrown to the Many in consolation for the hijacking of public debate and political rights by the Few, and for the big merger between today’s politicians and wealthy corporations that took place largely without people’s consent or knowledge? Is it a sideshow to conceal democracy’s decline? Is dignity talk another case of charity substituting for justice? Or is it justice trying to emerge as best it can in the face of widespread opposition? Just as Jesse Jackson’s poignant “I am somebody” dignity campaign in the early 1970s expressed more a future wish for a “rainbow coalition” than a present reality, [329] it’s worth noting that forty years later some people view the “first African American president” as a good house nigger with whom they can do business, but a nigger all the same. [330] More generally, there is certainly ample evidence in the daily news (hazing, sexual assault, domestic violence, illegal and immoral predatory behavior of all kinds, escalating unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and hopelessness) that would suggest the new dignity and the human rights agenda articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 remains a dream that has not yet been fulfilled. [331] A beautiful dream, perhaps, but not the daily reality of most people, who, on the contrary, are stuck in a “freedom recession.”

If democracy is the form of government best equipped to fulfill the promises contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the most translated document in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records—there remains the challenge of how to “install” that operating system in places where it has hardly ever existed, and the even greater challenge of how to defend it in places where it is under direct attack and shore it up in places where it is suffering daily indirect attacks on its advisability, affordability, or sustainability in today’s world. [332] Tocqueville can be of help in this struggle for democracy and dignity. And of course his words can also be of use to dictators and democracy skeptics who need only to read his recommendations and design ways to undermine their implementation—the most effective strategy being simply to do nothing, since as Tocqueville has demonstrated, left to its own designs without “auxiliary precautions,” democracy quickly runs itself into the ground all on its own without the intervention of outside “evildoers.”

American democracy circa 1830 took two generations to build. It followed several generations of local, in-house trial and error experiments in community organizing that had been going on since 1607. A shaky version 1.0 came online slowly between 1776 and 1781, and then a version 2.0 went public in 1788 with a succession of patches and add-ons over the next fifty years. But on its present destructive course, American democracy’s death will likely coincide with the extinction of the last baby boomers sometime around 2040, i.e., the bicentenary year of Volume Two of Democracy in America.

Those who would like to avoid the irony of having some lines from Tocqueville read out at democracy’s funeral will want to pay attention to his list of recommended attitudes and policies put forward with near bullet-point clarity in the second to last chapter of Democracy in America (DA II, 4, 7, 389–397). His list of the behaviors he wants to encourage and those he wants to discourage is predicated on the idea that it would be best to avoid “an absolute and despotic government” and embrace the “saintly enterprise” of creating and securing ordinary “independence and dignity” by being friends of equality. In other words, Tocqueville’s list is written for those who want to defend and strengthen democracy, not kill it off or keep it from emerging in the first place. He has made up his mind that political equality ought not to be denied in times that have seen the expansion of equality in all other areas. This follows from his early claim (DA I, 1, 3) that it’s impossible to keep men unequal in one area while they’re equal in all others: “On ne saurait concevoir les hommes éternellement inégaux entre eux sur un seul point, égaux sur les autres” (DA I, 115, G60). This may sound like trying to get an “is” from an “ought,” yet he acknowledges the possibility that some may want to have nearly all men (besides themselves, of course) be equally powerless when it comes to politics (i.e., public debate and decision making) instead of similarly empowered.

Tocqueville is perfectly willing to concede that some prefer vertical, hierarchical social arrangements of authority (in some, many, or even all settings) over inclusive, horizontal, i.e., democratic decision making. And so do most people. After all, who thinks an airplane pilot should walk back to the passengers in coach and ask them how to respond to the turbulence that the plane is experiencing? How many people think children under twelve should be invited to debate their bedtime? Or be co-equals in primary school curriculum planning? In many areas most of us expect hierarchies of competence and power and find an “elitist” selection based on tests, relevant experience, or other objective criteria to be just and good. However, there are many areas where reasonable people may differ about who gets to participate in the decision-making process, how, and how much. This is why Tocqueville concludes his “Real Advantages of Democracy” chapter (DA I, 2, 6) with the direct, second-person address to his readers to get clear about what they really want. The passage is worth citing in full.

Many readers will probably focus their attention on the contrasting portraits of the aristocratic regime (presented via questions) and the democratic regime (presented as a series of “if” clauses), perhaps wondering to what extent the two roads pointed out to “you” are mutually exclusive. However, the last paragraph is also important since it contains Tocqueville’s advice about what to do in the likely event that one is not entirely free to choose the regime one will live under. In that case, says Tocqueville, whether it be horizontal democracy or vertical authoritarianism, or some combination of both, try and make the most of it by staying alert to your regime’s positive and negative tendencies and doing your best to restrain the latter while encouraging the positive aspects. Mindful perhaps of this pragmatic advice from DA I, namely the necessity of paying constant attention to the positive and negative dispositions and inclinations given the conditions at a given moment, he then proceeds in the second to last chapter of DA II to make his list of policy recommendations that will favor “manly” liberal democracy and discourage the oppressive “soft” democratic-despotism he described in the previous chapter (“What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” DA II, 4, 6).

His first observation is that it makes no sense to come out in favor of “small government” and try to shut down or dismantle the state (Paul A. Rahe and Teapartiers take note). For Tocqueville, remember, soft despotism is preferable to a free-for-all and also better than traditional, hard totalitarianism. It’s necessary and desirable that the state should be active and powerful in democratic times since individuals are all relatively weak, but it should be kept from abusing its agility and force (“Il ne s’agit point de le rendre faible ou indolent, mais seulement de l’empêcher d’abuser de son agilité et de sa force.” DA II, 390, G823).

The second observation is similar to what Publius asserts in Federalist #51, namely that “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The levers for obliging the central government to control itself in aristocratic times were the regional power centers of quasi-independent dukes, counts, princes, and other local lords who could extend or withdraw their cooperation when it came to the royal administration of government policies (i.e., their interpretation, application, and enforcement). (See Shakespeare’s history plays, e.g., Richard II and Richard III, for proof of this.) In democratic times those independent instruments of control are by definition lacking, but substitute “democratic procedures” can replace them, says Tocqueville, and these will serve the same purpose of preventing the central power from both governing and administering, lawmaking and law enforcing over every nook and cranny of citizens’ lives. [333] Tocqueville shares the Federalist view that the “partition of power,” keeping it divided and dispersed—the famous “branches” of government—reduces the likelihood of tyranny, but dismantling the state increases the likelihood of having society swing endlessly and unpredictably between extremes of anarchy and tyranny.

Over the next seven pages Tocqueville praises once more the freely engaged in associative life in democratic regimes as that which will check and counterbalance the central power’s tendency to want to make and enforce all the rules. If hereditary civil servants are out, they can nevertheless be replaced in democratic times by elective ones or by individuals appointed by elected officials to serve on local agencies, boards, commissions, and other administrative bodies. These democratic assemblies, says Tocqueville, perhaps inspired again by arguments from The Federalist, have the benefit of creating quasi-aristocratic offices without aristocrats. [334] There is the status honor, even holiness (“sainte entreprise”), attached to carrying out a certain task judged valuable by the group. And since the tasks are carried out by the power vested in one’s office, not “in me,” the impersonal execution qua president, senator, sheriff, chair, dean, or school superintendent brings less risk of the traditional aristocracy’s injustices and dangers, namely arbitrariness, arrogance, blindness, cronyism, encroachment, favoritism, impulsiveness, impunity, immunity, insularity, lawlessness, overreaching, secrecy, smugness, or all of the above. Play the role of aristocrats, for a term or two, “temporarily,” but not be aristocrats—that’s the thing.

Note the list of the different kinds of associations and therefore possible roles: “political, industrial, commercial, or even scientific or literary association.” Tocqueville is clearly suggesting that many other groups besides just the legal community (praised in DA I as a check on the omnipotence of the majority) can also play a counterbalancing role in democratic times. Among these are political groups (parties, lobbies, interest groups), private businesses, and as an afterthought perhaps but nevertheless included in the list are academies in the arts and sciences. Tocqueville could have little inkling about the future development of liberal arts colleges and research universities in the second half of the nineteenth century, but these associations qualify in his mind as positive counterweights to democratic tyranny, similar to the role played by the legal community and religious organizations.

Higher education is inescapably hierarchical and therefore aristocratic with its groupings and rankings of various knowledge workers and apprentices. (Those who know about a given subject get to stand at the head of the class before those who don’t.) And yet it is oftentimes democratic when it comes to its internal organization with faculty senates, peer review, and professor-presidents. For a century after Tocqueville’s death, higher education’s federating institutions (the Modern Language Association, American Historical Association, etc.) expanded and gained influence as important “auxiliary precautions” (Federalist #51) against the omnipotence of the majority. Like the legal profession with its “bar association,” academics in all disciplines value literacy, memory, logic, attention to detail and particular cases, and the cautious formulation and application of general principles, theories, and laws within reasoned arguments. As such, these “communities of memory” (Bellah) where academics do their work (sifting the past, examining the present, and setting a course for the future) strengthened democracy’s ability to criticize itself—a role that was left to lawyers, judges, preachers, and journalists in Tocqueville’s day, with imperfect results as he observes when lamenting the high degree of conformism and low liberty of intelligence in America (DA I, 332). Scientific and literary associations that sprang up around the country between 1860 and 1960—whether broad-based public universities or smaller but broad-minded private liberal arts colleges—fulfilled Tocqueville’s wish for “enlightened citizens” to act as defenders of “common liberties.” John Dewey (1859–1952), who was born the year Tocqueville died, was instrumental in articulating a new democratic relationship between schools and society that became a successful nationwide model (see his Democracy and Education, 1916). [335] Today, however, “the higher learning in America” (Veblen), like the country’s brand of democracy, is in deep crisis even as foreign students continue to flock to American campuses and foreign academics seek to imitate some American academic ways at their home institutions. [336] Yet one more ironic legacy.

Other things that Tocqueville says ought to be stressed in democratic times, precisely because of the demolander’s self-destructive tendency to ignore or reject them, include the following three related items.

Teach democratic man the value of forms (G826). In aristocratic times when the classical doctrine based on clarity, order, and rules was preeminent, there was no need to insist on the importance of manners, grammar, rituals, and ceremonies. In democratic societies where even spelling rules or stop signs can seem like an imposition, it is necessary to counteract the democrat’s tendency to consider all forms as annoying restraints and infringements on personal freedom. Not to do so is to weaken respect for the rule of law, which is a cornerstone of any democracy.

Teach respect for individual rights (G824–827). In democratic times that develop a passion for equality, tranquility, and blind obedience to majority rule (often in the name of “team spirit” or “family values”), it is easy for demolanders to have a bully’s contempt for individual rights, especially the right to think and act differently from the group. [337] Therefore it is of special importance that a free press and an independent judiciary be able to continuously remind forgetful, busy, outwardly brash but secretly insecure demoland citizens of (1) the importance of individual rights (freedoms to and freedoms from), not least because ideas and initiatives are almost always in someone’s head before becoming a collective idea, value, or project; (2) the general superiority of reality-based decision making over faith-based or fantasy-based decision making; and (3) the utility of the universal insurance policy provided by formal legal principles such as habeas corpus and due process that can be exercised on a moment’s notice even by individuals who, like in the case of catastrophic illness, think “that is never going to happen to me.” Alongside respect for individual rights and forms, a free press and independent judiciary are two more indispensable cornerstones of a democracy that it is in everyone’s interest—for their own good and the good of society—to cherish and uphold by demonstrating as often as necessary that the group (team, town, nation) is safer and stronger with them than without them. [338]

Temper the taste for movement, speed, and revolution (G827). For example, nothing is more normal in democratic times than a passion for “fast food.” It dovetails perfectly with the democrat’s desire for all that is quick, cheap, and “good enough.” But a “fast food nation” could learn a thing or two from the “slow food” movement that started in “Old Europe.” [339] Movement, speed, and change, which have often been practical necessities at many times in human history, should not be allowed to be promoted as ends in themselves—and particular suspicion should be applied to instances where, in Orwellian fashion, permanent change is promoted by so-called conservatives (“War is peace”). Tocqueville notes how the demolander’s “taste for change” is related to his contempt for forms and the seductiveness of force.

Tocqueville no doubt had France’s protracted nineteenth-century revolutionary history in mind, but there are hundreds of more recent examples of “revolutionary changes” and not just in the world of high-tech. For example, it is interesting to learn that PepsiCo, the global snack food giant, is in the process of rethinking its 1960s-inspired brand of endless, impulsive “fun and freedom” products (e.g., chips and soda) and will perhaps try to reposition itself as a health-food giant. Or that Pixar thinks of itself as a virtuous “fun factory,” a new-and-improved Disney that “really should be running Western Civilization.” [340] But experience has shown that the virtue of multinational corporations, like the virtue of nations, though to be welcomed, is often expensive, unreliable, and short-lived due to the frequent conflicts that crop up between doing good and doing well (enough). And when that happens, some auxiliary force must be exerted to advocate and enforce policies that will supply “by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives.” [341] This auxiliary force, which some will invariably decry and oppose (usually because it restrains their force), can emanate from any of the three branches of government—or from another source such as the press (including literature and now the “blogosphere” and “twitterverse”), NGOs, the academy, the marketplace, the pulpit, or from groups or individuals whose power is boosted by the Internet.

In an evocation of the problematic relationship of “Capital and Democracy” that occurs late in the expanded edition of Politics and Vision, Sheldon Wolin summarizes well the human costs of unimpeded glorification of high-speed, permanent change.

Tony Judt might have cited those words in his case study of Britain’s mangled rail and bus service; admirers of Charles Murray’s research might want to factor in Wolin’s observations when trying to understand what’s “coming apart” today and who or what is to be held accountable; and Paul Krugman might consider “The Great Mangling” or “Mangled and Stupefied” as a catchy title for his next chronicle of world economic history.

Turning back to Tocqueville, his observations about contemporary trends in this penultimate chapter concludes with a short list of goals (each introduced by an infinitive verb) that are most proper in “a world that is totally new” (G7).

It is important to note again that these are context-specific recommendations, not absolutes. Just as a cancer patient doesn’t receive the same treatment as a diabetic, other social ills would require other remedies. The situation as Tocqueville sees it in 1840 requires the measures he lists for the reasons he has already stated at length. And for one more that he repeats in the paragraphs that follow the one just cited: namely, the fact that in democratic times there are large numbers of people who “abandon liberty because they deem it to be dangerous” while others, “fewer in number but more enlightened,” also abandon liberty “because they judge it to be impossible” (G830). Tocqueville is particularly sharp with the latter on this page, probably because many come from within his own peer group from which he takes his distance.

However, Tocqueville does not despair but instead tells the reader once more the reason behind his whole enterprise—the raison d’être of the whole book—which is grounded in his belief that liberty is not necessarily dangerous nor is it impossible.

In other words, Tocqueville does not believe, as many did and still do, that democracy is doomed to fail. He goes on to conclude this penultimate chapter with a final recommendation to his readers to maintain a “salutary fear” that will keep one “vigilant and ready for battle” and help fend off “the spineless and idle terror that afflicts and saps the heart”—the latter being a self-destructive, unsalutary yoke.

Vigilant and ready for battle strikes me as a stance worth adopting today if we are to pursue the worthy task that Sheldon Wolin, one of Tocqueville’s most astute readers, recommends to us in times of Superpower: “to nurture the civic conscience of society” (Politics and Vision, 606). But are there enough of us interested in that nontrivial pursuit today who are motivated and strong enough to oppose those of us who have other interests and motives? We shall see.