Quote of the Day (Tocqueville—Part IV)

“In America the principle of the sovereignty of the people is neither hidden or sterile as in certain nations; it is recognized by mores, proclaimed by the laws; it spreads with freedom and reaches its final conclusion without obstacle.

If there is a single country in the world where one can hope to appreciate the dogma of the sovereignty of the people at its just value, to study it in its application to the affairs of society, and to judge its advantages and its dangers, that country is surely America.” —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume One, Part One, Chapter 4, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop

(Sovereignty has a long evolution, and Tocqueville’s word on the subject was by no means the end of it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, however, has a useful working definition: “supreme authority within a territory.” In the same chapter in which he touches on the issue, Tocqueville also explains how the American Revolution thrust the concept of the sovereignty of the people outward from the township to the nation as a whole, and how the upper classes, surprisingly, hastened the new democratic order, even “in states where aristocracy had the deepest roots.”

At the end of this chapter, Tocqueville’s vision of sovereignty in the young nation takes on aphoristic force, as he beholds a phenomenon appearing from nullity to assume an overwhelming, mysterious force—reminding me of the force of God coming out of the whirlwind to speak to Job:

“The people reign over the American political world as does God over the universe. They are the cause and the end of all things; everything comes out of them and everything is absorbed into them.”

Electoral concession speeches rarely are memorable, but Walter Mondale’s, as Jimmy Carter’s running mate, in 1980 lingers in my mind. It had to have been a bitter pill to lose so badly, but Mondale did so with exceptional dignity, as he did more than two decades later in conceding the Minnesota Senate race to Norm Coleman. On the night of November 4—which turned out to be an unusually short way because of the size of the Reagan electoral landslide—Mondale told crestfallen well-wishers that the American people had “exercised their awesome power.”

Americans are about to concentrate on the race for the White House in earnest. For those disappointed in past results, it would do well to remember who has the “awesome power” of which Mondale spoke and which Tocqueville, virtually unique among snobby foreign visitors of his time, hailed.)