History’s Long Road to Tyranny: Tocqueville and the End of Equality
Americans, from the earliest days of New England society, had cherished equality while avoiding the grave evil of individualism. Tocqueville’s account of how they did so may be his most famous set of observations. First of all, Americans embrace with cool practicality and warm affection the life of the nuclear family; the small family consisting of only parents and children was a novelity in the Nineteenth Century, but Americans had made it an efficiently functioning unit that held together chiefly through affective bonds and which trained children for adulthood early — for hard work and careful decision making. American girls were more jaded and cautious than their naive but romantic European counterparts; American boys were enterprising industrialists with a keen sense of the flux of social and economic fortunes almost from the time they left grade school. The nuclear family does not specifically counter the effects of individualism, but rather accepts them and finds a familial form that can survive the great ebb and flow of economic fortunes absent the stability of land and broader social attachments to neighborhood, village, and province.
Four other American practices more directly counter the evil of individualism.
First, Americans all accepted a general Christian creed, a civil religion, that was too general to interfere in much of daily life, but which provided a foundation for morality, and morality provided a foundation for law. Without an unquestioned, if narrowly circumscribed, set of Christian beliefs, the naturally skeptical American would fall into the same state as the woefully “Cartesian” ennui that had taken over the mind of much of Europe. Prophetically anticipating the rise of nationalist movements later that century, Tocqueville contends that, without Christianity, men become so anxious and insecure that they will seek the security of belief they have lost regarding God in the persona of a ruler. Men cannot bear to doubt everything, and they will have their god one way or another. As T.S. Eliot observed in a particularly Tocquevillian moment, “If you will nto have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”
Second, the primacy of local or township government in American society made it possible for a great number of Americans to participate in political institutions on a regular basis. Whether as Fire Chief or head of the St. John’s Mint Festival, whether as Dog Catcher or Mayor, Americans were continually forced to turn away from themselves and to attend to the life and business of their neighbor. The long habit of such participation in public life convinced Americans that, despite their equality, they need not and could not be indifferent to the particulars of social life. This also preserved Americans from the tendency to invest their political beliefs in a few general ideas. Accustomed to the details of daily participation in political life, they did not let what is often called (wrongly, I think) “ideology” substitute for active engagement in the public realm. This was possible chiefly because the actions of political life were largely confined to the local level, even when the legislation directing that life occured far away.
Third, Americans formed and joined public associations outside of political parties with avidity. A foreign student of mine sees this present even now, but Robert Putnam and others have shown that, however much Americans love to join groups now, they did so much more frequently in the past. All public life and, indeed, all potentially “private” moral decisions found expression in some association or another. As Tocqueville observed, teetotallers in America did not simply sit at home and drink water, nor did they (as in France) apply to the prefect to keep an eye on the taverns. Rather, they joined a Temperance Union and marched through the streets of East Lansing — no doubt, on their way to a pancake breakfast to raise funds for future such marches.
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