When George W. Bush, in one of the most memorable lines of his acceptance speech, said that "Times of plenty...challenge American character," he was paraphrasing Alexis de Tocqueville, the most brilliant analyst of American democracy and American character. Indeed, for Tocqueville, the pursuit of personal wealth was the fundamental challenge to our utterly unique dynamic, creative and egalitarian character, for, unless it were tempered by religious faith, and unless we were reminded to devote a significant amount of our passion and energy to advancing the common good, the madcap quest for riches threatened American liberty.

Our rulers offer us a Faustian deal: they'll guarantee our material success, if only we leave them free to manage the society. Let us take care of everything, they say, and we'll make you rich and happy. The essence of the deal was perfectly embodied in Bill Clinton's reaction to the emergence of a budget surplus in the late 1990s. When someone suggested that the money should be returned to the taxpayers, he quickly replied, in a rare moment of total candor, "they wouldn't know how to spend it. We will spend it better."

There was no public outcry at Clinton's ominous remark, for precisely the reason Tocqueville gives: "If he attends for some time only to the material prosperity of the country," Tocqueville writes, in one of his most frighteningly accurate predictions of the ease with which a leader can amass power in a democratic society, "no more will be demanded of him."

Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms, as a melodramatic act of violence like a military coup or an armed insurrection. Not Tocqueville; He foresees a slow death of freedom. The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a lobster in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened. Indeed, the ultimate horror of Tocqueville's vision is that we will welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we control it. 

There is no single dramatic event in Tocqueville's scenario, no storming of the Bastille, no assault on the Winter Palace, no March on Rome, no Kristallnacht. We are to be immobilized, Gulliver-like, by myriad rules and regulations, annoying little restrictions that become more and more binding until they eventually paralyze us.

The tyranny he foresees for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of modern times. He apologizes for lacking the proper words with which to define it. He hesitates to call it either tyranny or despotism (although, lacking any better words, he uses the old ones), because it does not rule by terror or oppression. There are no secret police, no concentration camps, and no torture. "The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling." The vision and even the language anticipate Orwell's 1984, although Democracy in America was written more than a century earlier. Tocqueville describes the new tyranny as "an immense and tutelary power," and its task is to watch over us all, and regulate every aspect of our lives.

We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced. He foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives.

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

The metaphor of a parent maintaining perpetual control over his child is particularly prescient, for it is the language of American politics in the late 1990s. All manner of new governmental powers have been justified in the name of "the children," from enhanced regulation of communications on the Internet to special punishments for "hate speech;" from the empowerment of social service institutions to crack down on parents who try to discipline their children, to the mammoth expansion of racial and sexual quotas from university athletic programs to private businesses.

When we console ourselves with the thought that the government is, after all, doing it for a good reason and to accomplish a worthy objective, we unwittingly turn up the temperature under our lobster-pot. The road to the Faustian Deal is paved with the finest intentions, but the last stop is the ruin of our soul. Permitting the central government to assume our proper responsibilities is not merely a transfer of power from us to them; it does grave damage to our spirit. It subverts our national character, just as Bush warned us. In Tocqueville's elegant construction, it "renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself." We are brought to heel slowly and gently. Once we go over the edge toward the pursuit of material wealth, our energies uncoil, and we become meek, quiescent and flaccid in the defense of freedom.

It's encouraging to have a presidential candidate who, alert to the dangers of "times of plenty," is concerned with maintaining the greatness of American character.

Michael A. Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.