Louis Roney: American Democracy

French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his famous book, “Democracy in America” in the 1830s, and the prognosis he made did not portend a protracted and successful future for the American social experiment.

The long and short of it was that democracy’s reliance upon the masses of common people was equivalent to building a large edifice on an unstable foundation.

De Tocqueville wrote, “Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of thing…”

Americans find it peculiar when they learn that the concepts of our nation’s founders were not based on the kind of wide-open democracy that the U.S. enjoys today. The fact that the vote of a highly intelligent person could be invalidated by the bought vote of an illiterate disenchanted people then as it still may do today.

De Tocqueville wrote of “Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans”: “One finds in the human heart a 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.” He further comments on equality by saying, “Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power. As none of them is strong enough to fight alone with advantage, the only guarantee of liberty is for everyone to combine forces. But such a combination is not always in evidence.”

The 1789 French Revolution produced in the French people concepts of democracy that were not identical to those that the 1775 American Revolution had produced in American citizens. Certainly notable was the fact that Napoleon crowned himself emperor in Notre Dame Cathedral, some years after George Washington had refused the offer of an American crown.

De Tocqueville tried to understand why America was so different from Europe in the last throes of aristocracy. America, in contrast to the aristocratic ethic, was a society where hard work and money making were the dominant ethics, where the common man enjoyed a level of dignity that was unprecedented, where commoners never deferred to elites, and where what he described as “crass individualism” and “market capitalism” had taken root to an extraordinary degree.

De Tocqueville’s idea was that, “Among a democratic people, where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works to earn a living.... Labor is held in honor; the prejudice is not against labor, but in its favor.” (!)

De Tocqueville added that this equality of social conditions bred political and civilian values that determined the type of legislation passed in the colonies and later in the free states.

De Tocqueville was a forward-thinking prophet when, in his “Democracy in America,” he seems to predict the future of the world in the Cold War saying, “There are now two great nations in the world, which starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans…. Each seem called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.”

De Tocqueville’s prophetic foresight was as stunning then as it is now!

About Roney: Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF 2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award (Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)