On America’s 250th anniversary, return to “Democracy in America”

why him? A young French aristocrat who visited the country just once in the 1830s, Tocqueville was an unlikely prophet. He went on the trip partly to escape his parents, who disapproved of his courtship and his liberal politics. But his nine-month trip to 17 of the then 24 states filled 14 notebooks and produced “Democracy in America,” one of the best books ever written about democracy or America.

Its two volumes, written at an interval of five years, blend political science, sociology, journalism and prophecy. It’s long, sharp and funny at times. It is not universally loved: Walter Isaacson believes it to be the least read and most cited book about America. It is really a difficult task to read it from beginning to end. Better to dip into it like Montaigne’s “Essays” or a recipe book.

The recipes included explain how to mix equality, prosperity, law, religion, and democracy in the right proportions to create freedom. If the Federalist Papers told how it began, “Democracy in America” ​​tells how it is continuing. When Tocqueville wrote the book, the country was two generations away from its founding and two generations away from slavery. Success seemed likely but was still not guaranteed. When he arrived in New York in May 1831 on a nine-month tour on a fact-finding mission for the French government to study America’s prisons, the city’s population of 200,000 was housed within a few blocks of lower Manhattan. Paris was four times the size. It took foresight to convince Europeans that America was not a unique experiment but a model for the rest of the world.

quelle surprise

The US doing well in 2026 is no surprise to any reader, so why go back to the book now? One reason is moments of recognition. Get this, it’s familiar to any visitor who has ever laid down on a hotel bed after a long flight to America and watched cable news. “To a stranger,” he writes in the first book, “all the domestic disputes of Americans seem at first incomprehensible or childish, and he does not know whether to pity those who take such trivial trifles seriously, or envy the pleasure which enables a community to discuss them.”

Or this commentary on the presidential elections: “As the elections approach, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the population increase; citizens are divided into hostile camps (…) the whole country glows with excitement; the election is the daily subject of the press, the subject of private conversation, the end of every thought and action, the sole interest of the present.” Then, as soon as it is over, “this excitement passes away, calmness returns, and the river, which had almost burst its banks, sinks to its usual level; but who can escape the surprise that such a storm should have arisen?” Your correspondent, who is also a foreigner, has covered three presidential elections for The Economist. This is the best description of how they are. It also reflects Tocqueville’s fundamental view of American democracy: that the chaos on the surface of public life conceals a profound stability beneath.

Like other visitors to godless Europe, Tocqueville was struck by how religious the country was. “From time to time strange sects arise which attempt to find extraordinary paths to happiness,” he writes. “Religious madness is very common in the United States.” Sociologists would later argue that the greater vitality of religion in America could be explained by competitive pressures. There was no religious monopoly in the competition for souls, so any church that stopped stirring would fall.

It was another expression of the omnipresent, frenetic energy of Americans. “In the United States,” Tocqueville writes, “a man builds a house to spend his old age in, and sells it before the roof is built.” Instead of enjoying what they had, Americans were “restless amid abundance.” You could also see it in how they celebrated the holidays. If an American finds himself a few days off at the end of a year of hard work, “his eager curiosity drives him to the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel 1,500 miles in a few days to relieve his unhappiness.” Remember this was written by someone who had never seen an airport right before Thanksgiving. Some of this restless energy was directed towards politics. But mostly it was spent on commerce and purchasing goods.

Yet rather than scoff at these qualities – love of commerce, religious fanaticism, restlessness – as other astute travelers have done before and since, Tocqueville thought that the strange passions of Americans were part of what made their democracy work. Religion provided a moral foundation, which was even more necessary in such a rapidly changing society. Focusing on business taught Americans patience, flexibility, and a willingness to compromise, all qualities that were defenses against the kind of revolution that France had suffered (and which had nearly severed Tocqueville Père et Mère’s head from his shoulders with a steel blade).

One of the best passages of the book describes the difference between the two sides of the Ohio River. On one side was the slave state (Kentucky) while on the other side was the free state (Ohio). In Kentucky, society seemed asleep. The Ohio, across the water, was humming. On the one hand, work means slavery, on the other hand, it means prosperity and improvement: “On the one hand, it brings dishonor; on the other, it brings honor.” Tocqueville was a racial pessimist: he believed that black and white Americans would never live with each other in a state of true equality.

Such excerpts are enough to read “Democracy in America” ​​at any time. But the book has additional resonance now because of its echoes of the 1830s in the Trump era. When Tocqueville was in America, Andrew Jackson was President and they met at the White House. The visitor was unimpressed. Jackson “was a man of violent temper and very generous talents; nothing in his entire career proved him worthy to govern a free people; and, indeed, most of the intelligentsia of the Union have always opposed him.” Envoys from foreign governments have said similar things about Donald Trump, although they are usually too afraid of retribution to print them.

Mr. Trump’s first election sparked a small uptick in Jackson studies, when he placed a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office. Jackson governed as a populist. His supporters were frontier soldiers, farmers and slave holders. Some of them broke into the White House after his first inauguration and vandalized it. They were persuaded to go only because of the large amount of free alcohol they drank on the lawn outside. Like Mr. Trump, Jackson still horrifies the enlightened classes: He was cruel to Native Americans and was himself both a slave owner and a defender of slavery. For the current president, placing Jackson’s portrait near his desk was a sign that no one in his America has to apologize for the past except those who apologize for the past.

Tocqueville thought Jackson was terrible. But he was surprised that he could even address the head of state directly as Mr. Jackson (he has since changed). This part of Jacksonian populism he approved of. Tocqueville himself was a man who did not like his title and did not use it. American informality was important, as important as the Constitution or the courts, in what it says about a democratic society. When Tocqueville writes about democracy, he doesn’t just have in mind the business of electing lawmakers—the yard signs, attack ads, and fundraising emails we think of today. What he means by democracy is a way of relating to each other.

L’esprit de `76

He believed that America was a political experiment as well as a social experiment. Pre-Revolutionary France was a society of formal categories: in addition to their titles, aristocrats wore different clothes, ate different foods, had different leisure activities, and were even treated differently by law. This all ended in America, replaced by “equality of conditions.” This did not mean, as later socialists dreamed, that everyone was equally rich. This meant that no one was considered superior.

Signs of this similarity were everywhere. Even the way parents and children talked to each other was different from Europe. Sons were less afraid of their fathers, and fathers did not behave like prophets or dictators. When children became mature, their freedom was an “unquestionable right”. Each generation began anew, and inheritance laws prevented the accumulation of vast wealth. The goal of an elite class was to prevent their children’s children from ever having to work. In contrast, an American parent’s job was to bring their children up to the point where they could feed and clothe themselves, then let go. Young American women were more independent than European women. They could travel without chaperones; They may go “full flirt” before marriage. That too was equality.

Tocqueville’s book is not entirely encouraging. Running through it is a very French taste for contradiction. Everything contains its opposite. Democracy, like any other system, can destroy itself. Because he was so enthusiastic about America and self-government, his warnings carry greater weight.

John Stuart Mill, the greatest British liberal of that era, praised “democracy in America.” He called it “the first philosophical book written on democracy.” But he considered Tocqueville too pessimistic on some points. Mill envisioned that in a democracy the most intelligent individuals would lead society. Tocqueville thought democracy didn’t work that way. People like Jackson will lead, because in a democracy popular opinion is sovereign, and because democrats tend toward mediocrity in government. The most talented people will be so busy with business that they won’t worry about politics. As for the idea that public opinion would be shaped by talented writers and thinkers, the reverse was more likely. Mill’s counterpart in America would follow public opinion, not lead it.

In America, he wrote, “the majority erect terrible barriers to freedom of opinion: within these barriers a writer may write whatever he wishes, but he must repent if he ever steps beyond them.” This is no longer a good description of how America reasons. Hardly any question seems to be solved. But it shows how social media works, with its own world of information in which people not only silence debate, but they don’t even ask what’s worth debating.

He also feared democratic disintegration. Typically so fluent, Tocqueville struggled to define what to call it. Words like “tyranny” and “despotism” belonged to different eras. He couldn’t think of any words, so he described it instead. Democratic oppression, he wrote, “will be unlike anything that has ever existed in the world”. An equal, democratic society composed of people pursuing their own happiness could become so atomized that citizens would abandon politics, retreat, leave it to someone else. Over these people “will stand a vast and protecting power, which alone takes upon itself the responsibility of securing their contentment and watching over their destiny”. This power will attempt to keep people “in perpetual childhood”.

Tocqueville never returned to America after this one trip. He had seen enough to convince people at home that he had seen the future. Whether you like it or not, things are back to the way they were and there is no going back. He was right about this also.

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