Civics: Democracy in America
It’s an ambitious book that tries to answer why democracy is working in the US, when it wasn’t then in France, and consequently what is necessary for a healthy and successful nation. That democracy, and thus human equality, was inevitable, and would eventually come to every western country, including his France, is one of his foundational theses, stated as an observable fact, and even a sign of God’s will in his introduction:
“Everywhere we look, the various events of people’s lives have turned to the advantage of democracy… The gradual unfurling of equality in social conditions is therefore, a providential fact… God does not need to speak for himself in order for us to discover the definitive signs of his will; it is enough to examine the normal course of nature…”
It’s a long book, dense with observations, asides, and theories, but in the very first few pages you get a sense of who he is, even though he rarely mentions himself. He is an intellectual, a scientist, interested in the big questions, but not confined to the lab or to the library, because he believes the key to understanding is found by experiencing as much of life as you can and talking to as many different people as possible. He was an early ethnographer, and while he didn’t exactly walk across the US (his journey took him from New York to Green Bay to New Orleans to Georgia and back to New York), given the times he couldn’t fast forward past anything he thought uninspiring. He had to travel slowly, and he was also curious, didn’t confine himself to a precise agenda, and let events take him where they would. Not surprisingly I immediately liked him.
Democracy in America is his notes from that long trip cobbled into essays, and they reveal a man working through frustration with what he left behind — a country stumbling, often violently, out of monarchy towards an incipient democracy he sees as inevitable. He arrives in the US smitten, with a child-like admiration for this new country, glowing with praise, like a man who’s found his new love, but over time as that relationship wears on, doubts take shape, disappointments, and he begins to question the human condition. If this democracy (the ultimate form of government) in a country gifted with perfect conditions — isolated from foreign conflicts, with inexhaustibly rich land, with citizens of solid moral stock — is peak human flourishing, is it really that much better than what he left behind, or does every society come with a very ugly side of inequality? With the US in particular that is the state of “Negroes” and the “Indian races.”
Democracy in America, like any rich text, is impossible to summarize in a few bullet points — there are enough observations in it, often conflicting with each other, to give most readers with a political agenda “I told you so” material. He doesn’t hold back, isn’t shy to throw out whatever theory his travels inspired, even if it might conflict with what he wrote several pages before. I don’t say that as a criticism, because if you spend nine months traveling across a new land, writing about what you see and hear, open to the evidence, what comes out won’t fit neatly into any ideological box. Dogmatic thinking can’t survive being immersed in the world because the world is too complicated for that.
There are however a few core themes running throughout which struck me because they are surprisingly similar to what I found two hundred years later.
One is that for democracy to work the citizens need to have a shared moral code, and from that a shared purpose. Or, culture matters more than all else. He is very explicit and unwavering on this point — that while policy matters, geography matters, all of that is downstream of having citizens with “the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same ways, the same customs and among whom thought will circulate in similar forms, depicted in the same colors.” These new Americans share a worldview of what it means to be a good citizen, and have the same concept of a fulfilling life.
“I have said earlier that I considered customs to be one of the important general factors responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States. By customs I mean the term used by classical writers when they use the word mores — the different concepts men adopt, the various opinions that prevail among them and to the whole collection of ideas that shape mental habits. Thus I include in the use of this word the entire moral and intellectual state of a nation”
His customs (mores) are what I’ve called Thick Culture3, those views of life, and how it should be lived, that are so ingrained in people that they don’t realize they hold them. They are the foundational principles of the society that a person is born into, and which if they follow correctly, result in a purposeful life. What is the Good? What makes life worth living? What should we aspire to become?
What does he see those to be in the US? It is a desire for independence, religion, and material wealth.
That is, you can only give the people freedom to do whatever they want, complete autonomy, if they themselves don’t want to do everything because there exists a greater authority than government — God.
