Frenchman critiques American democracy

From hear­ing all the aca­d­e­m­ic jin­go­ists quot­ing Toc­queville I had the impres­sion that Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca would turn out to be a glow­ing review of the mar­vel that is Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy. In some aspects it cer­tain­ly is; Toc­queville had great admi­ra­tion for the accom­plish­ments of the fledg­ling repub­lic. What I found sur­pris­ing was how crit­i­cal he was not just of the Unit­ed States, but of democ­ra­cy itself.

I should have real­ized that Toc­queville would not have tak­en for grant­ed the ideas about democ­ra­cy that I was taught in school almost a cen­tu­ry and a half lat­er. More­over, I should have remem­bered that even if he were the strongest advo­cate for democ­ra­cy, his audi­ence was uncon­vinced. Com­mon sense in Europe said that democ­ra­cy was a sys­tem of gov­ern­ment that failed in ancient Greece; that if monar­chy was per­haps less than ide­al aris­toc­ra­cy would make up for its shortcomings.

Two things are most inter­est­ing about Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca: Toc­queville’s pre­dic­tions about the future of Amer­i­ca (some pre­scient and some sad­ly off the mark—no one bats a thou­sand in prog­nos­ti­ca­tion) and his vision of an Amer­i­ca which is all but gone, when the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment was weak, town gov­ern­ments were strong, and the sover­ieg­n­ty of the states was in debate. Toc­queville heaped great praise on the Amer­i­can peo­ple for obtain­ing their edu­ca­tion through par­tic­i­pa­tion in gov­ern­ment rather than obtain­ing edu­ca­tion for the pur­pose of par­tic­i­pat­ing in gov­ern­ment. New Eng­land town meet­ings were of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to him. Do such things hap­pen out­side of Ver­mont or New Hamp­shire (or tele­vi­sion stu­dios) any more?

Toc­queville’s chap­ter on race in Amer­i­ca was par­tic­u­lar­ly trou­bling. He pre­dict­ed that a race war was not far off, and though it did­n’t come to pass in the way he pre­dict­ed, the bloody Civ­il War did come, with the ques­tion of race right at its cen­ter. Fur­ther trou­bling was his obser­va­tion that free blacks in the North suf­fered almost greater dis­en­fran­chise­ment than their coun­ter­parts in the South, who had none of the same rights under the law and whose abu­sive con­di­tions are so infa­mous they need not be recount­ed. Even in the free states, Amer­i­can cit­i­zens of African descent risked assault and even slaugh­ter if they dared show their faces at the polling-place on vot­ing day. That’s not how they told it to me in grade school, but Toc­queville seems a more cred­i­ble source than a prac­ti­cal­ly anony­mous text­book writer; Toc­queville report­ed what he saw.

This was only the first vol­ume of two, so I can’t be said to have fin­ished Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca, but as it came in two vol­umes I’m count­ing them as two sep­a­rate books. I think it pru­dent that I reserve a more in-depth report for such time as I’ve read both volumes.