Dimensions: 8.54'' x 5.79'' 229 pages St. Martin's Press Publication Date: January 2000 Hardcover ISBN: 0312252315

January 2000
Tocqueville on American Character
By Michael A. Ledeen

In this book, Michael A. Ledeen discusses the portrait of the American people found in Alexis de Tocqueville's two-volume classic, Democracy in America (vol. 1, 1835; vol. 2, 1840). Tocqueville saw the United States as the bellwether of a grand historical trend toward equality. Although he greatly admired the energy and fortitude of the Americans he observed in the Jacksonian Era, he feared that Americans might eventually give in to selfishness, materialism, and dependence on government.

Mr. Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at AEI. His recent books include Machiavelli on Modern Leadership (1999) and Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away (1996). 

No one before Alexis de Tocqueville or since has understood us as well as he has, and no one can be considered well-educated without having grappled with Tocqueville's profound inquiry into American character. Tocqueville knew that the destiny of half the world would one day depend upon America, and it behooves everyone affected by that development--Americans and foreigners, friends and foes--to listen closely to him.

Tocqueville knows that we are a bundle of contradictions and that our inner turmoil is the source of our amazing energy. We are simultaneously and passionately religious and secular, isolationist and interventionist, pragmatic and idealistic, legalistic and iconoclastic. We even have tensions within tensions: our versions of Protestantism invariably stress the redeeming value of work and wealth and at the same time they warn against the corrupting force of great material luxury. Anyone who tries to slap a simple label on us has missed the whole point.

Above all, we are revolutionaries. Sometimes we do it deliberately, sometimes we just do it, but Americans never leave things the way they find them. We are dreamers and world shapers, and before long we will reshape the heavens as well.

We didn't need Karl Marx to tell us that while the philosophers had sought to understand the world, the point is to change it; we are the most potent collective force for change in human history. We are always tearing down old ideas and institutions, buildings and bridges, to build newer ones. Creative destruction is second nature to us. In our hands, even the seemingly mundane process of manufacturing becomes a revolutionary process, and that transformation recurs in every generation. Henry Ford, Thomas Alva Edison, Levi Strauss, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and countless others were forged in that furnace.

The misguided intellectuals who, in the late 1980s, announced that America had fallen hopelessly behind Japan and Germany in the manufacture of everything from computers to automobiles had forgotten one of Tocqueville's basic insights into our national character: we love a good challenge, and we can rethink, retool, and restructure faster than anybody else. The Germans and the Japanese now look to us for inspiration, and they manufacture a large percentage of their automobiles here in America.

Religion

Tocqueville knows that just beneath our drive for material success lies a hard core of religious faith that anchors all our activities. We are a frenetic people with a messianic vision of achieving happiness and goodness, first for ourselves, then for all mankind, and we are always in danger of losing our balance between the drive for personal satisfaction and the necessity of collective action to advance the common good. Religion constantly reminds us that we need to resist personal temptation and calls us to address the needs of those less fortunate. Religion lies at the very heart of the American enterprise, for without the morality that religion imposes, we risk a rapid descent into a frenzied pursuit of personal satisfaction. Tocqueville believes that if we were ever to lose our religious convictions, our fall would have two disastrous consequences: first, having escaped the tension between the quest for personal success and the moral requirements of our faith, we would lose our unique energy (in his elegant metaphor, we would "uncoil"); second, having discarded our commitment to the common good, we would fall prey to ambitious tyrants.

Tocqueville does not think it is very likely that we will lose our religious moorings, despite the concerted efforts of radical secularists. Unlike many contemporary intellectuals, he knows (and knows why) the separation of church and state was not supposed to drive religion out of public life, but was instead intended to protect religion from the predations of the government. Tocqueville hails it for that reason.

Tocqueville's Warning

Nonetheless, Tocqueville foresees the risk of tyranny in America, and he constantly warns us that we have far too few safeguards to protect our liberty. Indeed, one form of tyranny is part and parcel of our character: the tyranny of the majority that is implicit in our radical egalitarianism. Originality and individual creativity are throttled by standards imposed by majority convictions, and he is so impressed with the power of the American majority that he goes so far as to proclaim the absence of freedom of expression in America. Although he coins the term individualism in his brilliant exploration of the United States and is a great admirer of our frontier spirit, he also sees the enormous pressure for conformity that we exert on ourselves.

A revolutionary people will not fall victim to a tyranny of the traditional sort, and he does not believe that we will be taken over by an oppressor set on crushing our liberties. Rather, he believes that if we fall, we will be the victims of our own fatal shortcomings.

In Tocqueville's nightmare vision, we will devote all our energies to the pursuit of personal enrichment and satisfaction. We will abandon the free associations that have thus far protected us from a powerful central government and ask our rulers to assume new responsibilities and to exert new powers. Knowing full well that every government automatically seeks to expand its power, Tocqueville warns that if we ask government to do things that we should be doing ourselves, we seal our own fate. He implores us to remain true to our basic character and to unite for the common good.

Tocqueville is not by nature an optimist, but he cannot help being inspired by the spectacle of Americans conquering a continent; dominating the native inhabitants; enriching ourselves and expanding our numbers; creating a new form of government; inventing new methods of commerce, agriculture, industry, and transportation; and doing it all with an amazing combination of radical individualism and radical egalitarianism. Neither he nor anyone else has ever seen anything quite like us, and he desperately hopes we will keep it up, balance equality against freedom, and eventually transform the whole world.

Anyone looking cold-bloodedly at human history would bet against us. But then, according to all the odds, we shouldn't have gotten this far. The best news about our future is that it's still in our own hands.