TOCQUEVILLE ON AMERICAN CHARACTER

American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Ledeen (Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, 1999, etc.) relates assorted selections from de Tocqueville’s writings from the 1830s to current American politics.

De Tocqueville was a wry and perceptive observer of the US in a tumultuous era, and his critique of Jacksonian democracy had a fresh, outsider’s perspective. A French aristocrat, he was simultaneously intrigued by egalitarian ideals in action and keenly aware of the ironies and paradoxes they engendered. The seemingly boundless opportunities that America promised, he argued, could not allow every citizen to realize his goals solely through individual effort. “When men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track,” he warned in Democracy in America, “it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quick and cleave a way through the same throng which surrounds and presses him.” However, the subtleties of de Tocqueville’s analysis get short shrift here. Instead, Ledeen links arbitrary snippets to long, vacuous rants on a range of topical issues, from the role of religion in public life (unfairly constrained by rampant atheism, he charges) to moral corruption (rampant, especially among liberals and intellectuals). In Ledeen’s reading, de Tocqueville unequivocally endorsed geographic and social mobility, rugged individualism, voluntary associations, religious faith, and, above all, the Horatio Alger narrative of upward mobility. This interpretation is made possible by his stout refusal to consider the selected passages in the context of the subtle and often ironic essay in which they originally appeared, let alone take into account the particular historical setting in which de Tocqueville wrote. Sometimes the flimsy premise breaks down altogether: when de Tocqueville voices his pessimism or reveals paradoxes too unequivocally to ignore (stating, for example, that “freedom of opinion does not exist in America”), Ledeen simply disregards the philosopher’s judgment, concluding that “de Tocqueville underestimated the stubbornly anticonformist individualism embedded in the American character.”

A simplistic polemic that reduces de Tocqueville to jingoistic sloganeering.