Why Tocqueville Matters
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
It's where he contrasts New England (aka Vermont etc) with the South.
He essentially says:
- In New England, it's almost a Greek democracy b/c everyone is seen as equal and everyone is required to work together for the common good
- In the South, they tried to recreate the aristocracy. That was only possible if there were multiple classes of society with the lowest class being the primary manual laborers. In other words, if you didn't have serfs then you needed slaves.
Year later, I was reading a comparison of the US vs Argentina. Similar size, similar resources and similar weather yet vastly different outcomes politically and economically. The thesis of the comparison was that Argentina imported the Spanish aristocracy model whereas US had a more egalitarian model.
It was interesting to see two somewhat similar comparisons made hundreds of years apart and coming to similar conclusions.
Excessive wealth is still kinda view suspiciously in Europe. As in “in you are that rich, we are in different world and I suspect you don’t have my best interest in mind or that you might be a closeted psychopath”
While in the US, wealth indicate value of the individual and it radiate to morality and intrinsic capacity ( of the individual… )
“I see that in a certain portion of the territory of the United States at the present day, the legal barrier which separated the two races is tending to fall away, but not that which exists in the manners of the country; slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary. Whosoever has inhabited the United States must have perceived that in those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.”
Perhaps I was fed a reductionist view of the Civil War in grade school, but this seems to challenge core assumptions we were taught.
My view of the Civil War was further shifted when I learned that Lincoln’s idea of ending slavery never implied amalgamation of former slaves into white society— something he was openly against. He literally tried (and inhumanely failed) to deport all the black people to a remote location.
Before the War, Lincoln publicly complained that the slave states were breeding all the unwanted “mulattos”. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the Confederacy, almost like it was a war tactic.
"In the South, they don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too rich; in the North, they don't care how rich you get as long as you don't get too close."
(tbf I think the situation described has improved since my childhood ... so not exactly stationary, but definitely glacial)
Honestly I disagree with the statement, prejudice is still going strong in the south. The civil war did not end slavery. Slavery kept going on until WWII in the US when it became a little too embarrassing for us when the Axis countries where pointing that out.
>Knowing Better - NeoSlavery - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
The industrial North was very much in fear of anybody taking their jobs. That included immigrant groups as well as blacks, though immigrants were usually able to assimilate within a generation or two, while blacks were permanently discriminated against.
There was plenty of discrimination against black people in the north after the war, too. But de Tocqueville was not around for the way southern bias turned into Jim Crow laws and lynching.
I think he was misled by the way southerners felt protected from blacks by slavery. They felt no threat, economically or personally. When the slaves were freed, that same emotion became virulent.
Maybe I read a different book, but in tome 1 there's some pretty racist chapters about the differences between white & black in America, and how they'll never get along or something.
It's possible he disagreed with "scientific racism" but he appeared pretty confident in some other racist views in that chapter in the first tome... (note his visit was before abolition of slavery)
I’m currently halfway through the book and don’t remember any particularly egregious (any more than I expect all 19th century European aristocrats were regularly racist) and am interested in what passages are most of interest to understand the argument.
Where we have proved that as a multicultural democracy, American has been successful, I firmly believe, is one of the ways where America truly is exceptional.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was lawful for municipalities to literally zone their cities to restrict Black residents, and most of those zoning ordinances took the form of disallowing residents of a regional minority race to move into any area with a dominant majority; accord was the specific reason given for those ordinances.
Whatever else you'd like to say about the argument, it absolutely fucked over the United States in profound and enduring ways.
These chapters are basically an extended critique of the evils of chattel slavery and of the American policy against the natives. He does indeed say that
"As soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two alien communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two alternatives for the future; the negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle."
Why? Because blacks have been so oppressed and there are so many of them in the south, that it would be impossible for them to live together with their former oppressors after being liberated, both would fear and hate the other. And what does he mean by wholly mingle? He is advocating mixed race marriages, something that wasn't legal everywhere in the U.S. until the Supreme Court forced it to be in the 1960s.
There are surely lots of passages in the book that 'read' as racist by modern standards, but by 1830s U.S. standards, Tocqueville was very progressive.
The details & practical concerns, although I've a feeling reading this article is painted as lesser than these higher level "general ideas" is something Tocqueville seemed to find somewhat admirable, or at least he was neutral about it. That basically local government would have an elected official for small, specific matters was a very US thing.
Overall he seemed to emphasize how the decentralization in US was in contrast to deep centralization in France (and China, at the time too apparently).
How this decentralization meant the principle of "subsidiarity" was applied closely in the US (and was the only major country doing it).
(https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1444121638857891844 for a tweet-sized definition of that principle)
As a side note, China is probably the first country to have a central government.
Tocqueville reminded me that objective truth doesn’t help you against an angry mob.
“ It is difficult to imagine a durable union of a people which is rich and strong with one that is poor and weak. Even if it were proved that the strength and wealth of the one are not the causes of the weaknesses and poverty of the other. A union is still more difficult to maintain at a time when one party is losing strength and the other is gaining it. This rapid and disproportionate increase of certain states threatens the independence of the others.”
[1] https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3b69...
I enjoyed this lecture by a law professor about Washington Irving and the social subtexts in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The prof makes substantial use of Tocqueville. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGMKQ8De_xo)