Alexis de Tocqueville's Prophecy of 'Democratic Despotism' which aptly describes Twenty-First Century America
The French author of the famous book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville presciently foresaw the undercurrents of a political phenomenon that lamentably came to fruition in twentieth- century America reaching its climax following two world wars, FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. That phenomenon was described as democratic despotism. Alexis de Tocqueville opined:
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.
By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I do not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all the forms that democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.
Tocqueville elucidates further on the democratic despotism phenomenon:
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. 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?
Thus it every day 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. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
What is most lamentable about democratic despotism, isn't foremost the budgetary bloat of the colossal public sector, or the taxation burden, but what it does to us as human beings. It drains the vitality out of men, and alienates their affections for "the little platoons" (i.e., family, community, voluntary civil assocations) as Burke dubbed them. Political apathy becomes the norm as the government is perceived as aloof, unresponsive, remote and even malevolent in its nature. Democratic despotism was an unfortunate outgrowth of egalitarian leveling run riot. Tocqueville conceived of liberty like an aristocratic stateman. Liberty and equality have ultimately proven themselves antithetical, precisely because we hapless moderns will not qualify equality and distinguish between the undesirable forms of equality. Tocqueville concluded: "I think that in the dawning centuries of democracy, individual independence and local liberties will always be the products of art. Centralized government will be the natural thing."In the reductionist conception of ideal liberty heralded by the sages of our times, we are errantly taught to conceptualize freedom in terms of access to the ballot, and the ability to democratically select our leaders. Regrettably, we ignore the moral hazards posed by democratizing so much of civil society. Contemporaneously, civil society cannot ignore the pervasive power of the state with its calculated programmes of public education, wealth redistribution, and an endless array of entitlement programs. The modern managerial regime is increasingly embracing the pagan ancien régime conception of the polis (πόλεις), where the state and society are subsumed into one another. This revival of pagan monism has the roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism, and if unchecked it can spell dismal results for a body politic, culture, nation and society.
