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Restless Virtue. - Review - book review

National Review, Nov 20, 2000 by Noemie Emery

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 722 pp., $35)

Tocqueville on American Character: Why Tocqueville's Brilliant Exploration of the American Character Is as Vital and Important Today as It Was Nearly Two Hundred Years Ago, by Michael A. Ledeen (St. Martin's, 240 pp., $23.95)

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a 25-year-old French judicial officer of the minor nobility, arrived in America, ostensibly to study the prison system and report back on the way justice was dispensed in a republican system. In the nine months that followed, he managed to see the whole country-from the east coast to the Mississippi, from New York to New Orleans-and met presidents and lawyers, frontiersmen and rogues. Over the next decade he wrote two volumes on democracy and the American people: an MRI, as it were, of the national psyche that seems as true today as when he wrote it.

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America was the world's first large modern democracy, and it appeared prototypical: Its traits were assumed to grow out of the democratic condition. Now that democracies have been created all over the planet, it is clear that they do not. America is less socialist, less tractable, more entrepreneurial than other democracies: more productive, more creative, more violent. Tocqueville's America was a small, rural, largely unsettled country, populated largely from the British Isles. Today, it is a continental superpower of 270 million people, multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religious. Yet the character Tocqueville described has been wholly unaltered.

Tocqueville has been of particular importance to conservatives, among other things helping to stimulate their interest in the wellsprings of civil society. Now Michael Ledeen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has written a brief, trenchant essay that pulls Tocqueville into the modern political argument. And Harvey Mansfield, the legendary Harvard professor who has trained a generation of conservative scholars and activists, gives us (with Delba Winthrop) a smooth new translation of Tocqueville himself.

As keys to America's success and character, Tocqueville cites three traits. Americans love money. They are driven by many intense contradictions. And they are always and forever on the move.

A new people in a new land, with a vast space before them, Americans came here to shake off the past, and kept moving; leaving one place as it was settled, always in search of the new. "It is rare that an American . . . settles forever on the soil he occupies," Tocqueville writes. "A man carefully builds a dwelling . . . and sells it . . . plants a garden and . . . rents it . . . embraces a profession, and quits it. He settles in a place from which he departs soon after, so as to take his changing desires elsewhere." Americans are also driven by a passion for money. In a culture without titles and fixed social classes, it is one of the few things that confers distinction. "There remains scarcely anything but money that creates any visible difference," Tocqueville notes, "the prestige that attached to old things having disappeared." Work is the main road to money, and as Ledeen notes, this has produced our great national rat race, as Americans seek to outdo one another-making more products, doing more things.

Added to this is an inherent tension, between Americans' religious beliefs and their urge to make money; between their individualism and their urge to be social; between the urge to enjoy what one possesses and the urge to possess even more. This is the cost of America's fluid class structure, which gives each man the chance to rise and infects each success with the shadow of failure, in that one can always go higher. Unlike other peoples, Americans do not need to be hungry or desperate to be moved to action and industry.

Oddly enough, the excitability of popular government is balanced by the bourgeois nature of the middle class. "I know of nothing more opposed to revolutionary [mores] . . . than commercial mores," says Tocqueville. "In a constitutional and peaceful democracy . . . love of wealth directs men principally toward industry. Industry . . . can prosper only with the aid of very regular habits . . . It is the very violence of their desires that renders the Americans so methodical. It troubles their souls, but it arranges their lives."

For Tocqueville, this commonsense temperament makes America resistant to demagogues. One may appear, he may strike a few chords, but beyond this he seldom gets far. "They may sometimes even applaud, but they do not follow him," Tocqueville says of the people.

To his impetuosity they secretly oppose their inertia; to his revolutionary instincts their conservative interests; their homebody tastes to his adventurous passions; their good sense to his leaps of genius; to his poetry, their prose. He arouses them for a moment with a thousand efforts, but soon after they get away . . . and, as if dragged down by their own weight, they fall back. He exhausts himself in the wish to animate this indifferent and distracted crowd, and finally he sees himself reduced to powerlessness, not because he is defeated, but because he is alone.

Restless Virtue. - Review - book review

National Review, Nov 20, 2000 by Noemie Emery

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