Democracy in America

This note was originally published on Chris' substack - Walking the World.

When I began writing about America I was told to read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which I didn’t do because I prefer to go in without biases, without expectations of what I should find. And also, while I respect the past, what possible insights could a book written in 1835¹ give me about what I was focused on then — addiction. No matter that he did what I was doing — traveling the country talking to whoever would talk to me, him for almost a year, me for ten. Our country had changed far too much in the intervening two hundred years, morphing from a larval federation of states clinging to the East Coast, with a titular toothless central government, into a continent-sized global superpower run from an imperious DC.

Yet my project changed, evolving into a study of a wider despair, a loss of faith manifest not only in drug abuse, but also loneliness, cynicism, and an anti-establishment politics — all things that can erode a democracy.

I knew I needed to read de Tocqueville, which I’m finally doing, and while I’ve only finished volume one I already believe it’s one of the most insightful books I’ve come across, and I’m also glad I waited, because I was shocked to realize we arrived at many similar conclusions — that it was done two hundred years apart, and largely independently², makes those agreements more meaningful.

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. 

“We Europeans are accustomed to look upon a restless spirit, an inordinate desire for wealth and an extreme passion for independence as grave social dangers. Yet precisely all these things guarantee a long and peaceful future for the republics of America.” 

“Americans have succeeded somehow to meld together in wondrous harmony: namely the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty”

“…. we see them seek with matching zeal material wealth and moral pleasure: Heaven in the other world, comfort and freedom in this.” 

This is shockingly similar to my American Dream, which I concocted two hundred years later, and summarized as, 

“A careerist Christianity—a prosperity theology which synthesizes a moral order built on the Old Testament, overlaid with a heavy dose of Lockean individualism and Enlightenment rationalism.”

But how does a country of citizens with an “extreme passion for independence”, who are, by European standards, under-educated avaricious riff-raff with little of Plato’s gold in them, ruffians without the learning, or the proper blood-line, to run their own lives, much less a nation, not descend into mob rule, chaos, and anarchy? This is an especially important question for a European in the 1830s to answer, even one on the enlightened side, because one of the supposed lessons of the prior years has been you can’t give the plebes too much freedom without it resulting in violence. That at least is the line from the monarchists, and they have plenty of evidence to support that. 

So how do you ensure that when people are given their liberty, are allowed by law to do whatever they want, unfettered by the oppressive hand of monarchs, lords, and nobles, able to own firearms, they don’t descend into anarchy? 

His answer, or at least what he sees in the US of 1831, is having citizens come from a “common stock”, and thus share a religious faith. 

“Thus, while the law allows the American people to do everything, religion prevents their imagining everything and forbids them from daring to do everything.”

“Religion, which never interferes directly in the government of Americans, should therefore be regarded as the first of their political institutions, for, if it does not give them (citizens) the taste for liberty, it enables them to take unusual advantage of it.”

“Tyranny may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot”

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. 

There is a line just before these quotes that I laughed out loud at. I was sitting in my usual corner booth of a McDonald’s reading, with the surrounding tables reeking of weed, young men on their gambling apps, having spent the prior half hour online, being bombarded with ads urging me to break, and posts celebrating obliterating, each of the seven deadly sins, and then I read this paragraph: 

“Up until now, no one in the United States has dared to promote the maxim that everything is legitimized in the interests of society, an impious maxim which seems to have been invented in an age of liberty simply to justify every future tyrant.”

His quote is a refined version of what I’ve written many times, that a nation with no moral authority other than the government will end in either anarchy or a police state. Either citizens have checks on their behavior that come from their own sense of moral order (instilled by their family, friends, and spiritual leaders) or society becomes permissive to an extent that things fall apart until the police step in. 

I thought of highlighting the quote, and tweeting it out with some witty reference to the Cato Institute, or Ayn Rand, or some quip about “Welcome to 2026 Mr de Tocqueville, do you want to go in with me on a sure NFL parlay?” but instead I sat and giggled and realized we’re close to the point of no return and that impious maxim is now part of who the US is. 

Every action being legitimized, morally and now legally, is our current reality, and that’s taken place as religion — de Tocqueville’s first political institution, the substrate that democracy needs to build on — has eroded in the intervening two hundred years, reshaped into not a foundational check on behavior, but rather into an absolution ritual. A dispensary of forgiveness, without any demands for amendment. You can do anything you want, especially if it makes you wealthy, as long as you come to church, and especially if you put in a second donation for the new audio-visual system to make some especially rad sermons. Or more commonly, as long as you embrace its deformed cousin, 2020s secular humanism⁴, which asks nothing of you other than moments of empathy on your search for finding the true you, the inner self that needs to be emancipated and massaged into shape with self-help books, weekly therapy, and educational moments of regret. It is not the loss of belief itself that is pernicious, but the loss of a non-governmental moral authority capable of making demands on believers.

There is an early line I kept returning to because for much of volume one I was surprised by how similar his US was to ours — “The entire man comes full formed in the wrappings of his cradle… something similar happens in the case of nations: they always carry the marks of their beginnings.”

I’ve always been skeptical of such extreme foundational determinism, that a thick culture can survive uncorrupted for two hundred years, even through cataclysmic events, such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialization, the exponential growth of our population through immigration, the ballooning of the federal government, the move from isolation to imperial power. Yet Democracy in America provides plenty of evidence that thick culture has a great deal of inertia — it is the ship that is slow to turn. If in 1831 a visitor from France can spin a stereotype of Americans (freedom-loving risk-taking entrepreneurs carrying bibles and guns seeking a fortune⁵) that sounds little different from what I’ve heard foreigners describe America as today, then maybe a nation does “always carry the marks of their beginnings.”

By the end of the volume though, I was more focused on the differences, and how our thick culture had shifted, towards a secular liberalism that embraces “the maxim that everything is legitimized.” 

Why is that? To put it in de Tocqueville’s language, it’s at first blush because the “tyranny of the majority” has gotten what it wants. American culture has changed because that is what the citizens demand. In my language it is the voice of the Metis, which in a democracy is what is supposed to shape the culture, not the elites. 

As he writes, “In America the sovereignty of the people is not hidden…. it is acknowledged in custom, celebrated by law.”

De Tocqueville’s push-back, assuming I’ve read him correctly, would be to blame the change on a bad shepherd, or in this case on an incompetent aristocracy. Because for all his celebration of democracy, he believes it is a flawed system, if not correctly directed by an educated class. He is still an elitist through and through: 

“…that the purpose of a democracy, in its legislation, is beneficial to a greater number of people than that of an aristocracy. But that is the sum total of its advantages…… being masters of itself…. Aristocracy moves forward cannily… Democracy is not like that; its laws are almost always defective or untimely.” 

And without that proper guidance, with the majority left to decide what we want, then a culture will veer off course, into the gutter, and a well-ordered culture is what holds a nation together, allowing a democracy to flourish, one where equality and liberty, not tyranny of anyone, elites or masses, rule. 

Writing about the France he had left, he places the blame for their problems firmly on the “rulers of society” for a failure to lead and educate the people. 

“The most powerful, the most intelligent, and the most upright classes of the nation have not made any attempt to take it (the culture) over so as to control it. Democracy has thus been abandoned to its primitive instincts; it has grown like those children who, deprived of a father’s care, are left to fend for themselves in the streets of our towns and who come to learn only the vices and wretchedness of our society.”

The elites are the parents, the voters children, or shepherd and flock, choose your metaphor. A democracy needs to be led, not just in policy, but in culture. A nation is only as strong as its thick culture is, and culture, not economics, is what trickles down, from the elites to the masses. 

“The people, instructed as to their true interest, would realize that, in order to benefit from the advantages of society, they would have to bow to its requirements.”

That gets back to my own view, which is every citizen, no matter what economic or social class, is a child of the culture they are raised in, and if you are worried about the health of a democracy, you must first focus on the culture. Again not the thin culture that gets all the attention (music, cuisine, etc) but the more foundational mores. 

I started off saying Democracy in America has enough material to provide most readers with “I told you so” material. Perhaps I am falling into that same trap, but the one thing I believe he is clear about is that he is a culturalist. 

He’s even more of a hard culturalist than me, and I found myself leveling criticisms at him that I am often on the receiving end of, which is that you cannot be so reductive and deterministic based only on X months of observations, and by the way, where is the data! I can even craft his likely response, which would be something like, “Culture is not something you can put into a spreadsheet!” Well, maybe more like, “not entered into a ledger.”

Yet even with all his inconsistencies, his simplifications, his biases inherited from the times, Democracy in America is a necessary work to read if you want to understand America, even two hundred years later. 

The question of the “future of democracy” is big right now, especially in academic circles, and hopefully those looking for answers will drag out de Tocqueville for lessons. That after all was exactly what his project was intended to address, which is what Europe could learn about the democracy experiment taking place in the US. 

My reading of the first volume tells me the answer is that for democracy to work, you need a culture (thick) that respects the core tenets of liberty and equality, AND has a shared faith. The shared faith doesn’t mean a theocracy — he (and I completely agree) is very clear⁶ that religion is not meant to be “linked to earthly governments”, but rather operate as a cultural and moral authority, distinct and separate from politics. That it is not political is precisely its strength, providing an independent pillar for society to build on. That also doesn’t mean that the faith has to be a dogmatic major religion, but rather a moral system that self-regulates citizens, providing them guard-rails on behavior, and that tolerates others. This last point is essential because in a liberal democracy, you cannot tolerate intolerance, since the whole structure is predicated on the willingness of each group to grant others the same freedom it demands for itself.

He also is careful about what equality means, and how it can be achieved: 

“But also, we encounter in the hearts of men a degenerate taste for equality which inspires the weak to bring the strong down to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in a state of slavery to inequality in a state of freedom.”

That is, equality has to be an optimistic goal, not one grounded in confrontation, achieved through lifting all boats rather than simply sinking the large ones. 

I don’t want to end this essay without addressing slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, because if a nation does “always carry the marks of their beginnings” then our original sin must still be with us, lurking beneath the surface. 

I am reading the book with a Catherine Project group and after the first several chapters, where he’s enchanted with America, a few readers pointed out the obvious inequality being glossed over. I noted it was a thick book and he was likely to address that issue, and boy does he ever. The last chapter of volume one, “A few remarks on the present-day state … of the three races…” is de Tocqueville at his most blunt, empathetic, and outraged. 

I don’t believe I can do the section justice, so I urge everyone to read that part in its entirety, because while the language is dated, he’s very clear that a great and unfathomable injustice was done⁷. As he says, 

“…that the European is to other races what man himself is to the animals? He uses them for his own convenience and destroys them when he fails to bend them to his will.”

As to the mark of slavery (and our treatment of Native Americans, which he is as damning of) that remains in our nation, you cannot spend any time in the US as a neutral observer, without political bias, and not still see it. While I don’t believe the US is a racist country (not in comparison to the rest of the world), it is denial to suggest the scars from our past treatment of blacks and the indigenous have been entirely removed, even if they might not take the exact shape today’s opportunistic politicians suggest. They are there, still impacting our nation, in policy, moods, and beliefs. 

He also uses slavery as a stark illustration of how culture shapes people, in this case how it corrupted everyone involved, including the working-class whites who were not slave owners themselves. He describes floating down the Ohio River, with free-state Ohio on the right bustling and industrious, and slave-owning Kentucky on the left, idle and decaying. His imagery, while a dispassionate description, nonetheless draws a picture of Good on one side, Evil on the other, that permeates everything, including people’s souls and the soil. Slavery, as well as being a great tyrannical injustice, rotted the entire culture, including the mores of the masters and white citizens themselves, degrading their attitudes toward work and the very worth of human beings.

“The influence of slavery extends still further to make its way into the very soul of the master and set a particular direction to his ideas and tastes.” 

That I can read de Tocqueville today and find myself nodding along in agreement, far more than laughing at his outdated naivety, is a testament to the value of his insight, but also to how sticky culture can be, and how important. 

That we are still here, and are the superpower he thought we would become8, suggests that for all our problems we have gotten something right. De Tocqueville believed it was our cultural foundations: our commitment to liberty, equality, and the pursuit of wealth through hard work, under a system in which the “principle of sovereignty of the people hovers over the whole political system.”

To the unobservant our success will appear providential, but providence isn’t a mystery, it is about good design atop a healthy culture. 

That is my take-home lesson from reading de Tocqueville now — if you want to address the “future of democracy” then you have to address the culture it rests on, because all else flows from that. 

Despite my misgivings, despite my concerns our culture is close to the point of no return, we’ve righted the ship before and putting on my de Tocqueville hat (for a brief moment) I predict we will do it again, because we can’t possibly let this slip through our fingers, can’t possibly throw all this providence away. 

Nobody would choke that badly. 

1 The first volume was published in 1835 based on his nine months in the United States in 1831. 

2 While I’d never read de Tocqueville until now, it’s enough of a foundational influential work that it’s hard to untangle, and completely remove from influencing me, what I’ve learned before from him, second hand. His work has become part of our national myth, directly and indirectly, and I’ve been certainly affected by that. 

3 Thin culture is the surface stuff—fashion, food, music. Thick culture is deeper: What is the Good? What makes life worth living? What should we aspire to become?

Thick culture is the plot we follow, while thin culture is the stage settings.

4 Look, I’ve got nothing against the intentions of secular humanism — it’s trying to take the best of religion (a moral system which directs people to the good) without the dogma, transcendence, and historical weight. Yet, what it’s become is a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, morphing into a relativism easily grafted onto the political ideology of the day. 

De Tocqueville has two great quotes, “Faith is the only permanent state of mankind.” and “Faith changes its allegiance, but it does not die.” You can try and remove the transcendent from life, but it is the carpet too big for the room. It will pop up again in a different, and corrupted form, somewhere else. In our current times, that is politics. 

5 A great quote from the final chapter of volume one, “I cannot better express my thoughts than by saying that Americans endow their way of trading with a kind of heroism.”

6 “We have seen religions closely linked to earthly governments, dominating men’s souls by both terror and by faith. But when a religion contracts such an alliance, I am not afraid to say that it acts as would a man by sacrificing the future for the present and risks its legitimate authority by gaining a power to which it has no right.

When a religion seeks to base its empire only upon the desire for immortality which torments every human heart equally, it can aspire to universality but, when it happens to combine with a government, it has to adopt maxims which only apply to certain nations. Therefore, by allying itself to a political power, religion increases its authority over some but loses the hope of reigning over all.”

7 It is said that de Tocqueville failed to predict the coming Civil War, but I didn’t read him that way. Sure he didn’t precisely predict what was to come in thirty years, but he was very clear that slavery was an issue ripping the Union apart, with no solution in sight that didn’t include great suffering and violence. He thought it would be in the form of a slave uprising, but anyone who read his work then would come away certain that there was in the young nation a deep divide with no non-violent solution looming over it. 

8 From his conclusion for volume one — 

“Therefore, a time will come when we shall be able to see in North America one hundred and fifty million people all equal to one another, all belonging to the same family, sharing the same beginnings, 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. All else is uncertain but this is certain. And this is something wholly novel in the world, the significance of which the imagination itself cannot even grasp.

Today two great nations of the earth seem to be advancing towards the same destination from different starting points: the Russians and the Americans.

The point of departure is different, their paths are diverse but each of them seem destined by some secret providential design to hold in their hands the fate of the world at some date in the future.”