The Limits of our Democracy

Has America reached the tipping point? Alexis de Tocqueville was French political thinker who traveled America in the early 1800’s. His treatise Democracy in America is a two volume masterpiece in which he states with impeccable clarity the very issues this country is facing today. Observing problems of slavery in Jacksonian America, he concluded that equality is an unstoppable force. He also warned that equality is its own worst enemy.

Tocqueville said there are two kinds of equality. He wrote:

“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” And this:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” And this:

"But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom". Is that what is happening in America today? Trading equality of opportunity, freedom, for equality of outcome, socialism?

America was not founded as a Democracy. It was founded as a Republic. There is a difference. In a true democracy, all people vote on all topics…and the majority rules end of discussion. In modern day America, every American would vote on every issue by remote control!! In a Republic, people elect representatives to vote for them. We rely to a good degree on their wisdom. In nascent America, we didn’t vote for President. The Electoral College is the remnant of a system in which the President was elected by elected officials of each state. Voting citizens were defined as white male landowners…translated….only those who had a stake in the economic game could vote. Let’s face it, these guys didn’t trust the masses and feared the mob.

As Tocqueville traveled America in the 1830’s he watched the contradictions play out. He realized that as America industrialized the system as outlined by the founding fathers in conjunction with the realities of life would somehow have to reconcile. He noted that George Washington signed the Naturalization Act of 1790 prohibiting people of color from becoming citizens. He predicted that slavery would end, but there would be great difficulty in assimilating blacks into society as a whole for generations. Tocqueville was adept in pointing out the weak spots in our ideals and our system. He was able to point out with specificity the limits of Democracy, and imply that it would have an ignoble end.

Of course he wasn’t the first to say that. Ben Franklin said:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Perhaps America should re-examine these great thinkers as we contemplate the limits of our Democracy.  In modern America, are any of us "entitled" to either liberty or safety?