“To a stranger all the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to be incomprehensible or puerile, and he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them.
But when he comes to study the secret propensities that govern the factions of America, he easily perceives that the greater part of them are more or less connected with one or the other of those two great divisions which have always existed in free communities. The deeper we penetrate into the inmost thought of these parties, the more we perceive that the object of the one is to limit and that of the other to extend the authority of the people.
I do not assert that the ostensible purpose or even that the secret aim of American parties is to promote the rule of aristocracy or democracy in the country; but I affirm that aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and that, although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point and soul of every faction in the United States.”—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
(I confess only to channel-surfing through part of the 1993 remake of Born Yesterday, because Melanie Griffith, Don Johnson and John Goodman could in no way measure up to the actors who originally played their characters—Judy Holliday, William Holden and Broderick Crawford. But one sequence from the remake stood out for me. It came when Nora Dunn, playing a journalist, asks Griffith if she’d actually read Alexis de Tocqueville. The point of the scene soon becomes apparent: More people quote Tocqueville than actually read him.
A couple of years later, with the book’s reputation as a classic—and this film sequence’s satiric point—still in mind, I bought a copy of this political science lodestar, intending to read it when I got the time. Well, it’s 700 pages, and I still haven’t gotten through the whole thing. But if I could make it through Ulysses and Anna Karenina eventually, I know I can make it through this shorter, pre-modernist title.
The Democratic and Republican conventions this week and next offer a good pretext for reading this 19th-century French observer of America. During his tour of America, he interviewed Andrew Jackson, well settled into his first term as President, where he had inaugurated a new, non-deferential style of American politics, as well as the embittered candidate he had defeated, former President John Quincy Adams, a man derided for stiffness who, in turn, viewed his opponent as an ignoramus. In certain respects, it’s possible to see a contemporary counterpart for them in George W. Bush and Al Gore.
From what I have gleaned from Democracy in America so far, Tocqueville discovered much that remains true about America even today—including its preference for practicality over theory in politics, the place of private institutions in this country, and the contradictions in a polity that valued the common man and yet came nowhere close in its race relations to fulfilling its egalitarian ideals.
Was it Mark Twain who defined a classic as a book that nobody reads? Maybe. But from what I’ve read so far, I can gather more about the American experience and the nature of the people who create it from Tocqueville than from the Democratic and Republican Party platforms.)
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