Tyranny of the majority

Pope Benedict referred to that threat, one that a body of citizens and its leaders can stumble its way into, when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in April 2008. There’s a might makes right implication in it, and he warned these leaders not to usurp the ultimate human rights of all citizens to their inherent dignity and religious freedom.

The anniversary of the death of Alexis de Tocqueville, though largely overlooked in a week of tax deadlines and tea parties, brought fresh reminders of that warning from this “great thinker of modern times”, who pretty much nailed the essence of America as a foreign observer, better than many Americans even know.

Among the severest was his statement that because of the tyranny of majority opinion, “there is no freedom of mind in America.” Political correctness reigns. The majority craves adulation, and even the minority who know better cravenly comply.

And to think, he published this in 1835.

Whether his descriptions of us still hold or not, Tocqueville is invaluable. Reading him is like running a virus-scan on the American polity. How healthy are those immune functions like federalism and the jury system? Does religious belief still protect us from willfulness on one side and despair on the other? If not, what can be done?

What can be done if enough willful Americans pay attention (unlike the frog in the boiling pot) to the changing environment of this representative republic, maybe using Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as a reference point, we can start making repairs as the seams come apart in the fabric of the nation. Not to wax poetic or anything…

He does, after all, warn against ‘soft despotism’. Pay attention:

Travelling through 1830s America, Tocqueville was struck by government’s apparent absence from this bustling commercial society. Unlike France, Americans had no particular regard for government officials, let alone politicians. They wanted to be let alone to follow their chosen pursuits. Why, Tocqueville wondered, did this not degenerate into anarchy?

The answer, he discovered, was two-fold. First, Americans had developed habits of free association. They did not address social and economic problems by asking the state to fix the situation. Instead they banded together to resolve their own difficulties.

Second, there was the influence of religion. Tocqueville was amazed at the plethora of religious activities in America which, unlike European countries, had no established church. While religious bigotry existed, religious liberty was generally taken seriously by American society and government alike.

This, however, did not translate into ACLU-like attempts to exorcize religious influence from the public square. On the contrary, Americans openly drew moral sustenance from their various faith traditions. This helped temper the everyday tensions of civil, economic, and political life. Simply being “a nation of citizens,” as President Obama recently labeled America, was not enough. “The Americans.” Tocqueville noted, “combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”

Remember those days?

And then there’s the problem of ‘class warfare’, as it’s called these days.

For all their love of liberty, Tocqueville stated, “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”

Democracy, Tocqueville argued, encouraged this fixation with equality because it requires people to relate to each other through the medium of democratic equality. This encourages us first to ignore, then to dislike, and finally to seek to reduce all differences that contradict this equality — particularly wealth disparities.

Mind you, all people are created equal. All outcomes of their endeavors, or lack thereof, are not.

This is key to what Tocqueville considered democracy’s tendency to “soft despotism.” Democratic despotism, Tocqueville thought, would rarely be violent. Instead it would amount to a Faustian bargain between the political class and the citizens. He predicted that “an immense protective power” might assume all responsibility for everyone’s happiness – provided this power remained “sole agent and judge of it.” This power would “resemble parental authority” and attempt to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving them “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

Recalling Tocqueville can get uncomfortable.

Is America on the road to comfortable servility? “The American Republic,” Tocqueville wrote, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, America has slowly drifted towards a political economy of soft despotism.

So….back to that question, what can be done?

In these circumstances, America’s greatest hope is hardly its political leaders. Rather it is those millions of Americans who still treasure liberty and have no intention of becoming comfortable serfs. As Tocqueville himself observed, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

Let’s hope he’s still right.