Michael Ledeen. Tocqueville on American Character. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Summarized by John Teevan, April 2013
I was intrigued by the name Tocqueville and found this book helpful. It is not quite a summary of Tocqueville, but an application of his ideas to many worthy and timely topics.
Introduction: Restless People Inspired by Ideas… Headed to New Frontiers:
He tells the story of the Emigrants who ignored mountain man Jim Clayman’s advice and still went over Hastings ‘short route to San Francisco through what became known as the Donner Pass. The 82 people of the Donner expedition followed Hastings’s map, but only 47 survived the winter in that frozen mountain pass.
In America, Tocqueville noticed the relentless advance of equality even in the restlessness of the Donner group. America, he believed, embodied the very future of mankind (12). Because we are a driven and ambitious people, we are strong enough to conquer a new continent and remake it in our own image (16). America’s success in spreading civilization is due not merely to geography or bounty, but to Americans themselves, who recognize neither limits nor obstacles, even to their own peril, as with the Donner expedition. But generation by generation, we will persevere even if not all make it and are left by the wayside.
Chapter 1: Dynamic People Driven by Internal Conflicts:
Tocqueville was impressed with the equality of all the people, even though he knew of slavery. He means equality of treatment and rank, unlike Europe. “The gifts of the intellect are proved directly from God, and man cannot prevent their unequal distribution.” He sees equality of condition, not equality of endowment (28). Americans have a restless passion for prosperity and are excited by competition, relentlessly pursuing it from ever-new angles. Like Carnegie, we’d rather give it away than corrupt our children. In the absence of a fixed aristocracy, our children need to play the game too (30).
Tocqueville met Andrew Jackson, the president, in 1831; a winner but a lout who made Tocqueville glad that few successful men went into politics. Note that 70% of today’s millionaires made their own fortune; they did not inherit it. Yes, there is a growing gap between the rich and the poor, but that is a result of our voracious appetite for success. Some people today favor self-esteem and victim status; this is to our peril. Unlike our European cousins (38%) or the Japanese (8%), we (90%) deeply respect the entrepreneur who gets up and hustles (39). No wonder we are constantly challenging the frontier. Just give us a level playing field (no quotas, please) and watch us grow.
The Perfectibility of Man: As religious as we are, we tend to believe that equality leads to the perfectibility of man. We will constantly improve. Jack Welch led an amazing ‘creative destruction’ at GE that made many wealthy, even though he fired about ¼ of his employees (46). We also love comebacks (Edison), repentant sinners (Clinton), and even convicted felons (Colson). We are willing to recognize our failures, but we just try harder.
A tortured and Revolutionary People: As for the American Revolution, we saw 100,000 loyalists (of a pop of 2.5 million) depart, never to return. They liked Canada. But we think that (1) freedom and equality are roughly identical (54). Only under a dictator is everyone equal (i.e., equally powerless), which is why we love success rather than hate it. As for our regions, we have various forms of (2) individualism: NE developed an ordered freedom. VA preferred the collective honor and dignity of their ancestral aristocracy. PA’s Quakers were reciprocal in their freedom…nearly libertarian. The backcountry Scots-Irish loved their natural freedom (56).
The Civil War was rotten and revealed our inner turmoil, but it moved us forward. We have the tension of recognizing that the American enterprise is also collective (58). We love the military and the voluntary local organization to make improvements. We love daring individuals. “The Donner group did not lose their freedom; they lost their lives” (60).
The Tyranny of the Majority: Americans have a tension between the sense of the community and the sense of individual freedom: (61) We tend to resolve it by an over-reliance (tyranny) of the majority. We discarded the old idea that the king could do no wrong: now the majority can do no wrong. The problem is that under the majority, we just become silent. The absolute monarchs attacked the body but left the mind free. In the democratic tyranny he sees rising in America, the body is left intact, but the soul and the mind are suffocated.” (63). This leads to contempt for the politically incorrect. Our faith in public opinion is nearly a civil religion (64). In the 1950s, the man in the (nameless, faceless) gray flannel suit joined an impersonal corporation and lost his individualism.
This, as well as government intrusion, is resented. Yet we love government and want it to do many things for us. This is a sharp conflict with our individualism, but it is part of what Tocqueville saw during his visit.
Chapter 2: Religious Faith Anchored by Secular Institutions.
Tocqueville was surprised that the Americans were at once materialistic and religious. This was because the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion not only co-existed (rare in Europe) but fed each other (69). He wrote: “Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its triumphs…it considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom” (70). Religious morality keeps materialist and democratic people in check, especially when there is no monarch to do so. “What can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?” he asked (71). Religious sentiment was very high in 1831. Ladeen thinks that the richer we become, the more religious (72). I doubt it.
A uniquely voluntary religion: Of course, Christianity in America was fundamentally different from the state church versions of Europe, with their long histories of offense and oppression. We are bottom-up, not top-down. Freedom of religion gave us dynamic religion, but it also gave us lowest denominator flexibility. Our materialism takes over, and we need an Awakening from time to time; the first gave us the revolution, and the second gave us the end of slavery. The third gave us the New Deal, he says, and we need a fourth (?) 75). In Europe, static religion led to deep pessimism, yet in America, dynamic religion led to profound optimism. Our egalitarianism is not only a political ideal but also a religious one. Tocqueville comments on this dynamism (83). This is debunked as mere greed.
Church and State: No one but the left believes in the radical secularization view of church and state. Education was initially moral education, and schools supported the churches. Europe has reason to take a different view, but exporting that secularism to the U.S. is unwarranted and requires a revisionist view of American history. Tocqueville warned, “If they want true freedom, they must support a lively religion” (94).
The traumas of 1914-1945 made America and capitalism teeter in self-doubt, leading us to consider soviet communism and German national socialism. Both systems rely on government rather than the market for basic information and investment direction and seem to make people happy. European intellectuals loved this, and their high status (low status in the US) allowed their insightful criticisms to influence the political elite (97). Religion had to fade if the state were to ascend, and they started with the Catholics and the protestant flavored public schools.
“Tocqueville recognized that liberty and democracy are threatened whenever the influence of religion is weakened.” (100). Luigi Barzini (1977) wrote that the greatness of America rests on biblical virtues: “resolution, loyalty, courage, sobriety, a sense of duty, tenacity, prudence, moderation, thrift, love of one’s neighbors and fortitude.” These virtues are similar to those of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul.
Chapter 3: Rugged Individualists with a Genius for Cooperation:
We organize ourselves to solve problems locally, as volunteers, without waiting for a grandee (Europe) or the government. Dictators, Tocqueville points out, excel at separating us from our neighbors and from all solutions, so they can oppress while pretending to provide everything we need. Without common efforts, civil society is too weak to defend itself (104). Sadly, and unexpectedly, “The vices which despotism are precisely those which equality fosters.” Maybe it would be better to say that radical equality requires an intrusive government to enforce it, and that such a government is a form of despotism. Rely on others or on the government? That is the question. Better to solve the little problems ourselves. The Catholics call this ‘subsidiarity.’ These can be both businesses and private NFPs. In the US, half of all adults engage as volunteers.
Tocqueville does not understand how this came about. It is not a constant in human history; it appears to have started here. Ladeen calls it the central nervous system of the American enterprise, and it works because we join in the work without regard for social status, focusing only on the need and the skills required to meet it. You have to watch out at work for your boss and betters, but not when you are filling sandbags.
Family and Friends: Men and Women: Equality stems from the family hearth, where bonds are rooted in emotion. Primogeniture, a great divider of families, does not exist in America, so brothers are more likely to be united than divided. Yet there are forces that hurt the family, like divorce and the illegitimacy that leads to single-mother households and multiple fathers. Kiss the family goodbye, and you kiss many other institutions goodbye as well, starting with the schools.
It is in women, Tocqueville claims, that the moral superiority resides. He found remarkable fortitude in the educated women on America’s frontier (117). He was a predictor of women’s liberation because he observed its seeds in America. Ironically, the ascent of women has led to a decline in men’s moral obligations. If the government replaces women, it will corrupt not only our liberties, but our souls (119). Women must be in associations as they are essential to the success of modern democratic society (121).
Why should unbridled freedom reign when it only leads us to anarchy? Fortunately, we had tried a bit of socialism before Lenin. Fortunately, the founders were aware of this enough to feign religious fervor, at least to reap the benefits that religion alone could bring. This continued through FDR and Truman, with a fading in Ike. Decency, morality, and virtue are civic as well as religious virtues, but this idea was faced with Andrew Jackson and lost with Bill Clinton (123). He likes a free press.
Self Interest Rightly Understood: So, we find fulfillment in our families, our work, our religion, and our associations, and we are willing to (temporarily) suspend our personal pursuit of happiness to advance the common cause (128). This is self-interest rightly understood, tempered by common sense and recognition of the value of the community. Virtue is helpful as Montaigne’s straight road is (129). But which is it? Our own empire or our mission to create heaven on earth. Both. We will take significant challenges and pour ourselves into them temporarily, which is why it is dangerous for our enemies to underestimate the resolve of the American people.
Chapter 4: Isolationists Called to International Leadership:
Our isolationism stems from our vast oceans and bountiful land and resources. We share a common citizenship rather than a common (and competing) ancestry. We are entirely glad that we left Europe as a continent broken by endless wars and sloppy philosophies and now led by second-rate people who are mere custodians of glorious art and architecture. We saved them twice and cannot fathom why they do not imitate our pragmatic economics and governance. We can hunker down and care for ourselves. This is what a nation is like when founded on democracy and finds peacetime normal rather than exceptional. Peace may have its own dangers in that we are slow to recognize danger and slow to respond. We want to stay out of other nations’ business. We have never attacked without provocation. We have been lucky, and we forget our treatment of Indians. Hey, we’ve had uniquely violent weather that’s also toughened us.
The Global Democratic Revolution: Our impressive and relentless growth could never have happened in Old Europe; it was too sclerotic. We can be glad we do not have hostile neighbors who would have exploited our weaknesses and would not have tolerated our mistakes.
Contamination: Tocqueville feared that we would not be up to the challenge of a serious aggressor, and the Soviets’ ability to cross the ocean with missiles could have led us into servitude (159). This is not his best part: We found it challenging to deal with victory in that we lacked a long-term vision and have a propensity for simple, short-term fixes with “the blithe pretense that there is no need to prepare for future conflicts.” (161).
There are only two ways we can fall: a sudden act of violence or by a gradual yielding to the state the effort to fulfill our virtues and dreams. “With every major war, the government grew more powerful and more intrusive, limiting our businesses, directing our education, monitoring our communications, even driving religion out of major sectors of public life.” (163). This is dangerous.
Chapter 5: Apostles of Freedom Tempted by Luxurious Tyranny:
Tocqueville recognized that in our pursuit of prosperity, we tend to neglect liberty. Our love of equality and the weight of public opinion can suffocate us under majoritarian conformity (166). First, we give in to self-indulgence, which distracts us and allows politics to fill the vacuum left by our new unwillingness to sacrifice for the common good. Then we will sacrifice liberty for the sake of law and order (a cage is better than a jungle). He tells of atrocities over the centuries against which there was no outcry, giving even more power to tyrants. The state offers small benefits and meddles rather than dominating, but our character erodes, and federal bureaucracies thrive. The locals’ free associations for dealing with problems fade away.
This government power actually looks democratic until we realize we are sleeping in the cage. “Nothing is so irresistible as a tyrannical power commanding in the name of the people” because it wields the impressive moral power of the majority and “acts with the quickness and persistence of a single man.” (177). Moral power is the power of equality, but it is an equality granted by the government. “The sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism…is simplified and reduced to a single principle (Tocqueville Vol 2 p 302).
The Corruption of American Character: Ladeen now adds that every war leads to more federal power. He quotes FDR in 1936, laying the blame for the 1920s and 1929 on the evil greed of the rich. He spoke in terms of the ‘golden calf.’ LBJ’s Great Society was cast as a war on poverty that would be waged federally. (180). He seemed to enjoy citing Davy Crockett, who long ago suggested that poverty be fought by having each congressman donate one month of his own salary (180).
There are certain beliefs we need to cave in on. 1) A belief in the inevitability of history as spouted by big theory historians because they paralyze us. 2) A cynical understanding that the system is too corrupt to be worth helping or even voting. Tocqueville understands corruption but notes that, instead of bribing kings, we now bribe businessmen, as with JFK’s ascent to power. “What is to be feared is not that greatness may lead to immorality, but that immorality may lead to greatness.”(187).
3. Accepting the Mafia politics of pure power. He diverts his attention to Bill Clinton.
The Way Out: Tocqueville was impressed that every prisoner he heard of could read and write. Education has become a state tool, often replacing or abdicating parents. Tocqueville’s list includes resisting intellectuals, resisting government comforts, and not tolerating government corruption or Mafia politics. Especially beware of those who rise quickly to political power without realizing what it entails, while pondering it from afar over prolonged periods. This is Tocqueville. (200). Focus on education and religion as arenas where we can still preserve liberty.
Tocqueville understood our character and our many contradictions yet saw us as the future of mankind. He saw the Colt 45 company of New Haven with its assembly line and immense success after a financial flop. Intellectuals are jealous of others’ roles in society and angrily resist success. Paying attention to these people would cause us to ‘uncoil’ as he wrote it in French.