Resurrecting Tocqueville for a New Generation of American Democracy

It’s almost incomprehensible for young people today to understand how the great American social experiment rose from the ashes of a tired, burnt-out Europe.

Commentary

There is a man whose name is regularly resurrected when looking back to America’s infancy for clues to its greatness and exceptionalism: It’s the name of Alexis de Tocqueville, the diminutive French aristocrat who wrote one of the world’s most significant books and amazingly roamed the very woods and waterways that many of us roam today, nearly 200 years later.

Years ago, my father and I stopped at a small museum in Brewerton, New York. The reconstructed log blockhouse displayed local historical artifacts from Native American, military, and 18th-century life. But it was a portrait bust of Tocqueville that got my attention. Thus began a lifelong love of “Democracy in America” and intrigue with everything Tocqueville.

The ghost of Tocqueville wandered onto the American stage once again at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month. Dr. Ben Carson, former secretary of housing and urban development, took the opportunity to educate a new generation of patriots, whetting their appetites with a brief overview of the man and his work.

“In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to study our nation because the Europeans were fascinated—they wanted to know how could a nation barely 50 years old already compete with them on virtually every level,” he said. He explained that Tocqueville looked at our government, our business environment, and our educational system.

“And he was blown away by the fact that he could find a mountain man in the middle of the woods who could read, who could tell him about the Declaration of Independence. But the thing that impressed him the most was when he went to our churches and he heard those inspirational sermons from the pulpits that inspired a ragtag bunch of militiamen to defeat the most powerful army in the world.”

Carson concluded with a quote attributed to Tocqueville, “America is great because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

Here, it’s only fair to point out that this quote is often misattributed to Tocqueville. Carson used the quote as far back as 2014, and was called out for it the following year.

However, Carson’s not the only one referencing this as a Tocqueville quote. Snopes.com is quick to tell us it’s been similarly misattributed by former presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan.

At this point, however, I’m guessing Carson would likely agree with bestselling author Eric Metaxas in his book “If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty.” Metaxas tells us the gist of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” “may ironically be best summed up in a famous quote misattributed to him.” He continues, “Though we now know [this was] someone else’s brilliant summation of Tocqueville, we know from the rest of his book that he saw clearly that it was the ‘goodness’ of America’s people that made America work.”

Perhaps one of the most well-known uses of the quote came in former President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech: his 1983 address to the National Association of Evangelicals.

Reagan said:

“And finally, that shrewdest of all observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it eloquently, after he had gone on a search for the secret of America’s greatness and genius—and he said: ‘Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.’”

For those unfamiliar with Tocqueville, he was a 26-year-old French aristocrat and lawyer who came to the United States in 1831 to study our penitentiary system. With fellow lawyer and friend Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville traveled our land by horseback, canoe, stagecoach, and steamer for nine months. With an outsider’s point of view, he documented America in its infancy. He “believed that equality was the great political and social idea of his era,” and that a budding America “offered the most advanced example of equality in action,” according to History.com.

America was giving the world a vision of life and possibilities they hadn’t seen before. It’s almost incomprehensible for young people today to understand how the great American social experiment rose from the ashes of a tired, burnt-out Europe.

While students today are schooled in American colonization, slavery, and systemic oppression, they often have no conception of the class conflicts, social upheavals, and political violence that had been the European norm for thousands of years.

Consider Tocqueville himself coming to America from post-Napoleonic France. Tocqueville’s family had been shattered by the French Revolution of 1789. His great-grandfather, maternal grandparents, aunt, and uncle had been beheaded during the Reign of Terror. To be clear, he lost most of his extended family to state-sanctioned mass murder. Tocqueville’s parents spent months in prison.

Dutch journalist Tim Brinkhof wrote this about Tocqueville: “As a youth, he heard stories of his missing family members: dukes and duchesses whose necks were placed under the guillotine by feverish mobs.

“It was by way of these mobs that Tocqueville became acquainted with the concept of democracy—the same concept he would spend a lifetime studying.”

Hereditary nobility, along with the rights and privileges that had always accompanied the aristocracy, were being erased by revolution—not just in France, but across Europe. Shockingly, “the people’s axe”—as some called the guillotine—“was associated with the ideology behind the revolution, representing equal treatment for all under the law.”

It was this background, this worldview, that Tocqueville brought to America. In Eric Metaxas’s aforementioned book, he synopsized the Frenchman’s looming question: “Why had the French struggled endlessly with political upheavals and violence in the decades since their revolution while America had enjoyed unprecedented success?”

Somewhere about now I must mention my dear parents who, whenever I spoke of “democracy,” roundly reminded me that we lived in a Republic. “You don’t want to live in a democracy of majority rule,” they’d warn, “because if 51 percent of the people want to start cutting off heads, the minority won’t have a choice.”

And so I come back to my father and me gazing at that Tocqueville bust in the blockhouse museum so many years ago. Why was it there?

Tocqueville and Beaumont had stopped at Fort Brewerton on their way westward toward Buffalo, New York. While there, Tocqueville had written about and visited Frenchman’s Island in Oneida Lake, the largest lake entirely within New York State.

This was exciting to learn because my father himself had visited Frenchman’s Island as a boy, where he’d found Native American arrowheads long since lost to time.

Documented in another great read, “Letters from America,” is Tocqueville’s tale of Frenchman’s Island, a tale well-known to locals. It’s the story of an émigré and his wife who had “fled the revolutionary turmoil of his native land.” After years of living on the island, the wife died and the man vanished. Tocqueville was so enamored with the story that he visited the island. But it’s his description of “those deep American forests” and “a lake several leagues long, surrounded by trees” that tugs at the heart. “All is as perfectly tranquil as the world must have been at its creation,” he wrote.

In 1997–1998, C-SPAN shot a truly amazing documentary: “Retracing the steps of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1831 journey.” The C-SPAN school bus made 55 stops over nine months in the eastern half of the United States. It even stopped in a tiny town called Brewerton, New York on Oneida Lake. The program officially began at the Tocqueville family chateau in Normandy, France, which featured interviews with his descendants. These videos are still available on the C-SPAN website.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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