What you quote is not especially scandalous. It uses the language of the time but is not wrong in that Europe essentially conquered the world and was factually superior to everyone else at the time where in some places people still lived like in the iron age.

> >The European race has received from Providence, or has acquired by its own efforts, so incontestable a superiority over all the other races which compose the great human family, that the individual, placed with us, by his vices and his ignorance, on the lowest step of society, is yet the first among savages.

From a political power perspective he’s correct though. Especially in 1830. I didn’t real this as biologically superior so much as “Europe is so great, it’s greater than everywhere else.” And at the time, wasn’t that true? Were there any major world players at the time? This was at the peak of industrialization that was having Europe eclipse historical powers like China and India. And this would all change around in the 20th century (and 21st obviously).

I think the word race was used very differently at the time and means more like peoples or nations.

You have to put Tocqueville in the context of his era.

Europe was still in the era of monarchies. In fact, even though France had just beheaded their monarchs they tried to recreate various flavors of monarchies for decades. They even installed an "emperor" in Mexico.

Tocqueville was trying to figure out if other forms of governance could exist.

I find it comforting that the same flaws we see in democracy today also existed in the time of Tocqueville. That does not mean that I think other forms of government are better. I agree with Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

It's difficult to say that the chapter "Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare" was proven wrong by history. Tocqueville isn't saying that revolutions will become rare period. He says that in societies with social equality (that is, without a caste system), revolutions will become rare, even when other forms of equality exist such as wealth/income inequality. All the revolutions you talk about in this thread are in societies with social class delineation. In countries like America, we can witness first-hand how extreme wealth inequality has not produced revolution in the same way that social inequality has in the past.

He also argues that there are great incentives against revolution in societies when people possess things they could lose in a revolution (his main example is property). I think an example of this is May 68's failure to bring political change due to the Communist Party's nonviolent stance/cooperation with the Gaullists. We can debate back and forth why they took an antirevolutionary position but consensus seems to be that they at least did not want to surrender what political power they had won through elections.

He also makes other predictions about how equality in social conditions causes people to be more individualistic and less communal, but at the same time less unique. Again, I think we can witness this first hand in America. Maybe he's wrong about other claims, but I wouldn't say this essay is wrong based on the title alone, since the actual essay reads spot on.

Is there any writer who is positive about the promise of America that you would recommend instead?

Demonstrating how little you know about your own subject, beyond that he was white:

https://archive.ph/mjnvX

he also supported the French mission in Algeria.

Is he just being descriptive of that current state of affairs though? Or does he attempt to justify it?

I guess I'll have to read it...

Wonder how you can subjectively conclud that the statement: “Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare” has been deemed incorrect?

> [...] he adored America.

Just another American holding up a book they've never read and screaming lines they've been fed by a think-tank about it.

"Some years ago several pious individuals undertook to meliorate the condition of the prisons. The public was excited by the statements which they put forward, and the regeneration of criminals became a very popular undertaking. New prisons were built; and for the first time, the idea of reforming as well as of punishing the delinquent, formed a part of prison discipline. But this happy alteration, in which the public had taken so hearty an interest, and which the exertions of the citizens had irresistibly accelerated, could not be completed in a moment. While the new penitentiaries were being erected (and it was the pleasure of the majority they should be terminated with all possible celerity), the old prisons existed, which still contained a great number of offenders. These jails became more unwholesome and more corrupt in proportion as the new establishments were beautified and improved, forming a contrast which may readily be understood. The majority was so eagerly employed in founding the new prisons, that those which already existed, were forgotten; and as the general attention was diverted to a novel object, the care which had hitherto been bestowed upon the others ceased. The salutary regulations of discipline were first relaxed, and afterward broken; so that in the immediate neighbourhood of a prison, which bore witness to the mild and enlightened spirit of our time, dungeons might be met with, which reminded the visiter of the barbarity of the middle ages."

Tocqueville, unlike the newly minted class of college-educated illiterates who would come to throw him back and forth at each other while throwing in English words they learned upon encountering their foreign equivalents on Duolingo, each smearing a little bit more of their unwiped fecality from fingernail to spine of the $38 Barnes-and-Noble hardcover reprint of a public domain translation, was complicated, and the phenomenon he described, Democracy in America, remains complicated.