Democracy in Tea Party America

When the French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought that France was in big trouble and could learn much from America. So one can only wonder what he would have made of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

BERKELEY – When the French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought that France was in big trouble and could learn much from America. So one can only wonder what he would have made of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

For Tocqueville, the grab for centralized power by the absolutist Bourbon monarchs, followed by the French Revolution and Napoleon’s Empire, had destroyed the good with the bad in France’s neo-feudal order. Decades later, the new order was still in flux.

In Tocqueville’s imagination, at least, the old order’s subjects had been eager to protect their particular liberties and jealous of their spheres of independence. They understood that they were embedded in a web of obligations, powers, responsibilities, and privileges that was as large as France itself. Among the French of 1835, however, “the doctrine of self-interest” had produced “egotism…no less blind.” Having “destroyed an aristocracy,” the French were “inclined to survey its ruins with complacency.”

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