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Barack Obama's America A timeless critique from Tocqueville. by Alexis de Tocqueville 03/09/2009, Volume 014, Issue 24 It seems that if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day, it would have other characteristics: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them. .  .  . When I think of the small passions of men of our day, the softness of their mores, the extent of their enlightenment, the purity of their religion, the mildness of their morality, their laborious and steady habits, the restraint that almost all preserve in vice...

It seems that if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day, it would have other characteristics: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them. When I think of the small passions of men of our day, the softness of their mores, the extent of their enlightenment, the purity of their religion, the mildness of their morality, their laborious and steady habits, the restraint that almost all preserve in vice as in virtue, I do not fear that in their chiefs they will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters. I...

Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago. What a pity! No one understood us so well, no one described our current crisis with such brutal accuracy, as Tocqueville. The economics of the current expansion of state power in America are, as I said, “fascist,” but the politics are not. We are not witnessing “American Fascism on the march.” Fascism was a war ideology and grew out of the terrible slaughter of the First...

What Alexis de Tocqueville noticed about America’s uniqueness over 170 years ago is even more valid today than it was back then: a daunting reminder of the caution with which the United States must proceed in its admirable efforts to plant democracies in rocky soil.

The simple fact is that we never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have. Yes, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed. This removed the military threat to the West, and the most hardcore, economic Marxism suffered a blow as a credible alternative. However, one of the really big mistakes we made after the Cold War ended was to declare that Socialism was now dead, and thus no longer anything to worry about. Here we are, nearly a generation later, discovering that Marxist rhetoric and thinking have penetrated every single stratum of our society, from...

John Fonte examines the philosophical antecedents of the culture war to show why the culture war takes the shape that is has. He reveals why a constant vigilance towards the permanent things that breathe life into the culture is necessary. The essay runs about fifteen printed pages but the time spent reading it will prove worthwhile. As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation's history when certain ideas are just "in the air." Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as...

Upon Joseph Ratzinger’s election to the papacy in April 2005, many commentators correctly noted that Benedict XVI’s self-described theological “master” was St. Augustine. The fifth-century African bishop is widely acknowledged as a giant of the early Church whose life and writings are counted, even by his detractors, among the most decisive in shaping Western civilization. Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, is full of citations and themes drawn from Augustine’s texts. The encyclical’s publication appears, however, to confirm that another, more contemporary thinker has influenced the way that Benedict XVI views religion in free societies and the nature...

Religion has always been linked to political power, often controlled by kings and despots. In a democracy, there's a different kind of link. Freedom allows everyone to raise questions, confront dogma and challenge beliefs. That's why maintaining the complete separation of church and state is crucial. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the United States in the early 19th century, identified this separation as crucial to democratic governance. Religion gave support to democratic political institutions because it restrained the exercise of liberties, appealing to conscience and morality in lieu of imposition by the state. De Tocqueville's words came to life in the...

Bernard-Henri Levy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns,...

THE TOCQUEVILLE FRAUD The Weekly StandardNovember 13, 1995 By John J. Pitney, Jr. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is a beloved, canonical text; the urge to quote from it is understandably great. Politicians ever seek to demonstrate familiarity with it, from Bill Clinton to Pat Buchanan. One of their favorite quotes runs as follows: ------------------------------------- I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers - and it was not there . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests and it was not there . . . in her rich...

I have been writing a little book on Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who, after a mere nine-month visit in 1831, wrote "Democracy in America," which remains the best book written about the U.S. Tocqueville is famous for his powers of prophesy: One of his best calls was predicting the future struggle for world hegemony between the U.S. and Russia. But his power for prophesy dims beside his flair for generalization. Although he could scarcely have known this, much of the pleasure provided by Tocqueville is in testing his bolder generalizations 175 years after he formulated them. His ratio of...

Tocqueville foresaw a new soft despotism coagulating around the lower classes, with their low tastes and their resentments of anybody supposedly better than they are. They will want everybody pulled down, controlled, regulated, to enforce a leveling equality. The passion behind this machinery of repression will be envy. Here is how he describes it: I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls....

Rediscovering American Character By Michael A. Ledeen Posted: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 ARTICLES National Review Online   Publication Date: October 10, 2001 The most amazing thing about America has always been ourselves, as we are rediscovering in our exemplary response to the disaster of September 11th. “A restless, reasoning, adventurous race,” our national psychoanalyst, Alexis de Tocqueville called us, “which does coldly what only the ardor of passion can explain.” We are a bundle of contradictions, at once the most religious and the most secular, the most individualistic and the most socially conscious, the most isolationist and the most interventionist...

NEW YORK - In the glory days of the French-American cultural love affair, visiting Gallic thinkers brandished Gauloise cigarettes when uneasily fielding questions from reporters here. Sartre, Beauvoir and others swirled their miniature teachers' pointers to signal passion about ideas. They held them skyward to evince disdain. They snuffed them out forcefully to shut down a subject. Welcome to 2005. Now peace-loving Jacques Chirac raises cigarette taxes 20 percent a year as he wages a "war on tobacco" against the third of French adults who still smoke. And here in a Manhattan conference room, Random House also lives by no-smoking...

At the present time, more than in any preceding age, Roman Catholics are seen to lapse into infidelity, and Protestants to be converted to Roman Catholicism. If you consider Catholicism within her own organization, it seems to be losing; if you consider it from the outside, it seems to be gaining. Nor is this difficult to explain. The men of our days are naturally little disposed to believe; but as soon as they have any religion, they immediately find in themselves a latent instinct that urges them unconsciously towards Catholicism. Many of the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic...

Anyone who has read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America knows of his extraordinary mind. He was not only a wise, penetrating, and prophetic, but his was an aristocratic mind: magnanimous, urbane, and free from sectarian prejudice. Hence one should take all the more seriously his assessment of Islam: "I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so...

http://www.policyreview.org/dec00/fonte_print.html Why There Is A Culture War Gramsci and Tocqueville in America By John Fonte As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just "in the air." Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in Francis Fukuyama’s "The End of History?" have come to pass — that ideological (if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is...

Ah, the French. How to think of them? There is an easy default answer: kindly and gratefully. After all, they helped us in the Revolutionary War, gave us Alexis de Tocqueville and the Statue of Liberty, and to this day feel a keen republican spirit in harmony with America's own. Sure, we have had our spats. But when the chips are down, you can count on France to be on our side, more or less, and to supply some great wine if it is needed. ...Before 9/11, 77% of Americans held a favorable opinion of France. By March 2003, only...

One Nation Under.... By Don Feder FrontPageMagazine.com | April 30, 2004 What is it about the Left and God? Why do the mildest public expressions of faith drive them nuts? Is there a connection between the treason of liberals and their war on religious expression? Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, went to Iraq in the fall of 2002 and loudly proclaimed that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and Bush would knowingly lie to the American people to foment a war. If there was a Nobel Prize for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, McDermott would be the...

Carroll: Dean's thirst for world's approval is childishDecember 13, 2003Howard Dean believes a president should be judged by the worldwide popularity of his policies. At least that is what he suggested to Fox News' Chris Wallace the other day, after Wallace asked Dean why he'd said Bush "doesn't understand what it takes to defend this country, that you have to have high moral purpose."Wallace apparently thought he could cajole Dean into admitting the president did indeed have a moral purpose "in trying to set up democracy in the Middle East," even if the president's policies were all wrong. But the...