Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age

Front matter

Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age

C. Jon Delogu

Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age

Contents

I Tocqueville 1. Reading Democracy in America 35

II Democracy

III In the Internet Age

Introduction

As the title indicates, this book is about a particular man, an idea, and the time period we live in. The man, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), was a French aristocrat. His name designates a place in Normandy whose people and soil he was linked to, like his father before him, by Old Regime ties of loyalty and mutual service. But he was born in the aftermath of the idealistic and bloody French Revolution under Napoleon's dictatorship and therefore had both an intense theoretical and a practical interest in the history of civil society and the workings of monarchy, aristocracy, and especially democracy. After existing as a term of derision for over two thousand years,’ democracy had become the name of both a form of government and a flourishing way of life in nineteenth-century America where he traveled for nine months in 1831 and 1832 to investigate this unexpectedly successful experiment in popular sovereignty.

Tocqueville is most remembered as the author of a two-volume study Democracy in America (1835, 1840). It is a digest of his observations about America and offers argued predictions about democracy’s future prospects. It is a work that is still considered by many today, in the Internet age, to be “the best book ever written on democracy”? and “one of the wisest books ever written about us” [Americans ].°

Much has been written about Tocqueville, about his book on democracy, and about democracy in general since 1989, the roughly quarter century that I am calling the Internet Age, which also coincides with the post-Cold War era.* The purposes and opinions of these recent studies vary greatly and can strike one as a confusing, formidable mass. The task of making sense of Tocqueville and democracy in the Internet age is further complicated by the fact that many commentators seem more interested in being a sun than a satellite and therefore not all that concerned by what others have to say. I have tried, like Tocqueville, to be a better listener, as well as a mediator between individuals who seem not to be talking to each other. The result is this book, an extended essay that proposes an open assessment of both Tocqueville and democracy in the Internet age and asks what the fortunes of both might be over the next few decades.

I first became interested in Tocqueville over a ten year period from 1995 to 2005 when I was teaching annual seminars on Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and William James to French students of English at public universities in Toulouse and later Lyon. Despite Tocqueville’s aristocratic French origins, I noticed that he had many links to these four. He was only two years younger than Emerson (1803-1882), and he died the year Dewey was born (1859, the same year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which was, like the French Revolution and democracy in America, a major challenge to static visions of the universe). His death occurred a decade after the French civil unrest in 1848 and just before the division and destruction of the American Civil War that he had foreseen as a strong possibility. Furthermore, he had chronic health problems as did Emerson (his eyes) and James (depression), and he died of tuberculosis like Thoreau. He was also, like all four of these enormously creative, energetic, cosmopolitan Americans, both a thinker (in the moralist, prophetic tradition of essayists from Montaigne and Pascal to Montesquieu and Rousseau) and a practical man of action who extolled what Emerson called “the infinitude of the private man” and believed in the possibility of liberty and justice for all.

While reading The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson’s wonderful biography of Emerson, during a university strike in 1995, I learned that Emerson had actually met Tocqueville during his second trip to Europe in May 1848—one in a long line of revolutionary “French springs.’ I was also struck by the fact that they had both made bold, soul-searching trips to the country and continent of the other practically at the same time and for roughly the same length of time—nine months. The time it takes to give birth, so to speak, to new ideas, projects, and prophecies, and both of them clearly did.

Tocqueville arrived in America on May 9, 1831, and returned to France on February 20, 1832. Emerson first sailed for Europe on December 25, 1832, and arrived back in Boston on October 9, 1833. Therefore Tocqueville could have run into Emerson in Boston, in Concord, or somewhere else in America, but I have read no account that says he did. The man known to his family and friends as Waldo had not yet become Emerson, and there is no reason that Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont, who were officially in America as government emissaries doing research on the American penitentiary system, would have sought him out.

But by 1848 it was fitting that they should meet in Paris since by then both Emerson and Tocqueville were on their way to becoming the preeminent witnesses of the strengths and weaknesses of their respective countries, astute readers of the signs of the times, and disturbing oracles about what the future might hold. And of course 1848 was not just any year, but the hottest revolutionary period since 1789, which would later be a nostalgic source of inspiration if not exactly the blueprint for later revolutionary moments in France and elsewhere: 1871 (the Paris Commune), the 1930s (with the rise of Nazism and Fascism, the time of the Spanish Civil War, and the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the U.S. and Léon Blum and the Front Populaire in France), and of course 1968 (Prague, Paris, Berkeley) and 1989 (the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, the World Wide Web). The revolutionary upheavals and democratic aspirations that spread throughout the Middle East in 2011, the so-called Arab Spring, also elicited comparisons in the French press with the printemps des peuples of 1848.°

However, while they defended liberty and justice, Tocqueville and Emerson were both tradition-minded reformists who were largely opposed to l'esprit révolutionnaire and to socialism. Emerson famously refused to join the utopian communities that seduced many of his friends and acquaintances,° while Tocqueville considered the poet Lamartine’s revolutionary zeal foolish;’ and Louis Auguste Blanqui’s advocacy of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a speech in May 1848, which Emerson witnessed firsthand, shocked them both as terrifying fanaticism.* At the time they met, Tocqueville was serving on a constitution drafting committee to try to insert some checks and balances (such as a bicameral legislature) into the precarious French democratic experiment, though he confesses in his Souvenirs that the results fell far short of the work of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay and did not manage to forestall the eventual breakdown of order during the “days of June” or moderate the eventual pendulum swing back to total law and order during the Second Empire of Napoleon III.’ We will return in a later chapter to Emerson and Tocqueville’s shared aversion to socialism, their sympathy for the individual, and their fundamental belief in man’s essential freedom. My point here is simply to underline that it was a natural transition for me, after having completed my general introduction to Emerson for the French, to turn my attention to the second great witness of the American experiment in self-reliant popular sovereignty, Alexis de Tocqueville."°

The present volume is the product of my thinking about Tocqueville and democracy since his bicentenary year, 2005, when I began teaching a yearly seminar, on Tocqueville and democracy, to groups of French students as well as to visiting foreign students from all over the world who choose to study French for one year in Lyon while also taking law, business, or humanities courses all taught in English. These classes have been enjoyable and instructive. Enrollment has been consistently high, and students seem genuinely engaged by the material though very few have ever read Tocqueville before and many have never even heard of him. My French students seem glad to fill a hole in their culture générale and enjoy comparing their contemporary impressions of democracy with those of a nineteenth-century “Erasmus student” from Normandy doing field research.'' My Asian students, though mostly born after 1989 now, are generally curious about the word democracy in the title of the book to be studied and particularly interested in Tocqueville’s assessment of democracy’s strengths and weaknesses. For an American professor like me trained in the Socratic method and often stymied by tight-lipped French and Asian students who usually prefer to listen and take notes in class, it’s a relief to find that the material practically teaches itself since most of the students are willing to break their habitual silence and readily adopt Tocqueville’s own comparative method, pointing out similarities or differences between the situation he describes and the political situation in their own country. So I am convinced that students find Tocqueville and his writings compelling and relevant. Indeed, I would like to report signs of a general groundswell of enthusiasm for Tocqueville and democracy beyond the classroom as well, because I have sympathy for both, but in fact there is little evidence of either.

Reports of a revival or rediscovery of Tocqueville since 1989 or 2005 are in my view exaggerated. I’ve spent hundreds of hours commuting to work by train over the past twenty years, and I’ve yet to see anyone reading Tocqueville. No one who discovers I’m working on Tocqueville has ever said to me, “Ah, jadore cet auteur!” That Tocqueville is frequently mentioned in books or articles, or cited with a line or two pulled out of context, everywhere from Vanity Fair to the New York Times to the most in-depth scholarly journals, is scant proof that his work is actually read, understood, or respected.” The fact is Tocqueville remains largely inaudible” to older French readers, who are likely to prefer his contemporary Balzac (1799-1850) if they’re still willing to read a dead author, and shunned by younger French people, who, despite France’s traditional love of history, increasingly ignore anything that is not about themselves or that happened before they were born.

The same could be said about Americans, even more so perhaps, despite Tocqueville’s induction into the Library of America series with the Arthur Goldhammer translation of Democracy in America (2004)— the third translation to appear in quick succession after Mansfield and Winthrop (2000) and Bevan (2003) and just before the 2007 Norton Critical Edition edited by Isaac Kramnick that opted to recycle the original English translation from 1841 by Henry Reeve." So there is undeniable classroom enthusiasm about Tocqueville. I’ve seen it, and publishers have clearly been willing to compete with each other for a share of this no doubt small but I guess reasonably secure market. But in the larger scheme of things, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America stands as further proof of Mark Twains definition of a classic—something everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read.

Am I then just preaching to the converted, and to a rather small congregation at that? No, that is not my purpose, nor, as I see it, is there much incentive to address myself exclusively to Tocqueville scholars, since a perusal of the commentaries published on Tocqueville in the Internet age shows that many are manifestly uninterested in taking into account what their peers have to say on the subject. As I’ve said, they seem often not to have read each other’s work, and what’s more some of the best Tocqueville studies of the past dozen years have not been translated out of their original language. I would be delighted to be read by Tocqueville specialists as well as by curious nonspecialists, and they are both a part of my intended audience. But like Thoreau’s Walden (1854), this study is also addressed to “poor students,” especially students poor in imagination and short of time—not that I think their lack of imagination, narcissism, materialism, and now-focus are all their fault. One could even say, after reading Tocqueville, that focusing on short-term gains is perfectly normal and to be expected in democratic times. Tocqueville teaches one to understand how democracy raises decent but nearsighted men and women that I will refer to as “demolanders?'

In short, I believe Democracy in America is a marvelous resource, and knowing about Tocqueville and democracy is good for students and all voting-age citizens, just as I think it’s good to know how irony works, to know the difference between classicism and romanticism, and to commit to memory a few poems (and write a few of one’s own). I have the genuine conviction from the lively thinking I see deployed in term papers and final exams that students are truly grateful to have discovered Tocqueville, grateful to make some connections and feel less “clueless in academe,” less “academically adrift” Emerson said the American scholar ought “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”'® That is what Tocqueville did—though ultimately, like E. M. Forster, he was not prepared to give more than two cheers for democracy—and that is what I intend to do.'? But why this book now? It is not for material gain. I already have tenure and make a decent salary by French standards. I am motivated by an immaterial, I would even say spiritual necessity to step up and share my thoughts and feelings on this subject—Tocqueville and democracy in the Internet age—during a window of time in human history that sees men and women yearning for a new “sustainable” direction—for themselves, their loved ones, and the planet—and half-aware that if careful attention and application to this common search do not come soon, grave consequences for mankind and indeed all life forms are likely to ensue. I see myself, therefore, as a witness, and this book is my testimony and my contribution to that search.

In this pursuit Tocqueville, per se, is not of capital importance, though I persist in my belief that he is a valuable resource for discussing democracy and actual democracies and mapping out their future. That is what matters most. Editorially, Tocqueville studies is in a relative calm or holding pattern. The flurry of publications that came out around the bicentenary of the author's birth is over, and the bicentenary of his masterpiece

Democracy in America is still a ways off in 2035. Tocqueville’s writings received a burst of media attention at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Internet age (1989-1991), and again around the time of 9/11, and yet again around the 2005 bicentenary.” But that attention has mostly subsided now, which makes a lucid assessment of that earlier set of reflections more possible. And perhaps more valuable, because what has become increasingly popular and visible in the post-Cold War Internet age is debating the viability, suitability, and sustainability of democracy in the world today, a debate that goes on with or without Tocqueville’s help, depending on the participants, as part of the larger question about “the wealth of nations” and “why nations fail”! I will be making my contribution to that ongoing conversation in the second part of this book after a review of Tocqueville's strengths and weaknesses and those of some of the most noteworthy commentators of the past twelve years.

A list of world events since 1989 that have been the focus of discussions about democracy would include the following: the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and others, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the political and economic changes within Russia and the former Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe, the Masstricht Treaty establishing the European Union (1992), the Tiananmen Square protests in China, China’s economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping, the creation of Google and the entry of Google into China, the disputed U.S. presidential election in 2000, “9/11” and other terrorist attacks (Madrid, Bali, London, Mumbai), the war in Afghanistan and the second war in Iraq, the American military’s use of “extraordinary rendition” and torture during its “war on terror,’ the establishment of a five-year term and term limits (two) for French presidents, the “reign” of Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel (referred to briefly as “Merkozy”), the election of U.S. president Barack Obama (2008, 2012), the French “non” to the European Constitution (2005), the Lisbon Treaty establishing further European rules on immigration and the Schengen area of free movement within the European Union (2007), the global availability of Facebook accounts (2006) and Facebook’s IPO (2012), the financial crisis of 2008 and the “bailouts,” the “Great Recession” and “austerity” policies that followed, mass demonstrations of “indignant” citizens in several Mediterranean countries (2011), and the democratic movements in several Middle Eastern countries starting with Tunisia (December 2010) known as the “Arab Spring.”

Other events of more local concern, but that of course become world events in this Internet age of instant global communication, would include the completion of France’s switchover from Minitel to the Internet (2012); the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to permit essentially unlimited political campaign spending by corporations and unions (Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, 2010); the Oslo massacre (2011); the bombing of Libya (2011); the government suppression of civilian protests in Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain; the English riots against state spending cuts (2011); the heating up of the Scottish independence movement (2012); the Italian referendums against Berlusconi (2011) and his eventual ouster; the return amid protests and charges of corruption of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president (2012); and the presidential election victory of French Socialist party candidate Francois Hollande (2012), to name just a few.

A more diffuse set of incremental large-scale changes that have also entered into debates about world democracy—‘too big to fail” or “too small to succeed”?—include the spread of automation, personal computers, broadband access, cell phones, and smart phones. There is also the impact of so-called social media that has intensified and diversified the practices of e-mail, blogging, texting, instant-messaging, “Googling,” “Wikiing,” and “Tweeting.” Besides these technological changes in the way we live now that some might consider a new “passive revolution” (Gramsci) for good or evil, there have been widespread social changes such as the corporate, business-minded (and sometimes mafia-minded) takeover of the public sphere, the incremental privatization of many public government services (in health care, education, transportation, etc.), and the growth of individual retirement accounts and online trading, as well as the emergence of various countercurrents including the “slow food” and “real food” movements, the “antiglobalization,” “altermondialisation, and “global justice” movements, the “green” movements, and loosely organized opposition groups such as the Tea Party in the U.S. or the “Indignant” demonstrators in Spain, France, and other European countries and the “Occupy” movements inspired by the protests in

Cairo’s Tahrir Square since the 2011 winter of discontent with the Moubarak regime.

Finally, alongside these specific events and widespread changes and trends, one must consider the global pressures that have spurred both democratically organized associations of ordinary citizens and cohorts of government or corporate-sponsored experts and officials who exhibit a marked skepticism or even contempt for democracy and democratically elaborated solutions to current world problems.” First among these pressures is overpopulation, a subject succinctly treated by Aldous Huxley in 1958 in his Brave New World Revisited and more expansively in Paul Erlich’s bestseller from 1968, The Population Bomb, but curiously absent from news headlines today despite the efforts of groups such as World Population Awareness (www.overpopulation.org) and readily available statistics that show the world population has nearly doubled since 1968, from 3.5 billion to 7 billion in 2011, and will reach 9 billion in 2041. Other world pressures that are provoked and worsened by overpopulation (though this correlation is routinely ignored by the media) and in turn aggravate tensions between democracy believers and democracy skeptics include xenophobia and racism; mass migrations and homesickness, pollution and waste disposal; global warming and climate change, and shortages of water, food, energy, arable land, hospitable living environments, and good jobs. Predating and underlying these contemporary pressures on all societies and governments is a long-standing fundamental disagreement between democracy believers and skeptics about the existence of what New Yorker magazine business columnist James Surowiecki calls “the wisdom of crowds.’

Tocqueville usually had two things in mind when he talked about the birth and growth of democracy. The first was expanding equality of social conditions, by which he meant more literate people, more landowners, and more people living in basically similar ways when it comes to their shared memories, customs and habits, and aspirations. The second was a system of government: popular sovereignty—“government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln memorably put it in his Gettysburg Address (1863). These two notions of democracy are the main focus of the first volume of Democracy in America. In the second volume that Tocqueville published five years later, he develops a third sense that is democracy as a way of life, and even a religious faith though nowhere does he explicitly call democracy a religion. For Tocqueville, democracy clearly gives rise to a new species of homo sapiens, the demolander, who has different core beliefs and habits, or “mores,” than his ancestors.

The least controversial sense of the term democracy is when it is used as a synonym for expanded access. When the French, for example, speak of something being démocratisé, they usually mean that access to that product, service, or institution has increased to the point of becoming ordinary, banal, available to nearly everyone (often because of a drop in price or some change in the rules that regulate access). If early symbols of French démocratisation were the beret, the baguette, and the camembert, today they are postsecondary education, a cell phone, and vacation time at the seaside or abroad.

The less frequently heard meaning of démocratisation (no doubt because it occurs less often) is the expansion of the democratic character of a political regime, i.e., an increase of decision-making power in the hands of ordinary people, whether elected or appointed. It’s one thing to allow, say, student or parent representatives to attend school council meetings and sit around the same table with the principal, the faculty, and municipal school board members; it’s another thing to let them vote. Calls in France for “démocratie réelle” and more “démocratie participative,” such as one heard during the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal in 2007, tellingly underscore the long-standing preference in the République Française (and many other so-called democracies) for low levels of political involvement by ordinary people—in effect, democracy without democracy. Your presence may be tolerated in the room, or within the territory, but you will have little or no power, no say when it comes to public policy-making, no real participation. The history of France’s Fifth Republic has been one of liberal, though sometimes backhanded démocratisation in the first social sense (let the masses have access to cheap—i.e., inexpensive and shoddy— housing and higher education) and conservative containment of démocratisation in the political sense. Therefore don’t allow trial by jury, don't let tax-paying foreigners vote, and do allow politicians to hold more than one elective office at the same time with no term limits. But Frances ruling class is hardly the only political elite that is annoyed by voting and its ground rules (1 person = 1 vote, all votes are to be counted, majority rule, etc.) and quietly skeptical or openly hostile to allowing important decisions to be decided by popular vote. Democracy skeptics are everywhere. Look around.

One of the reasons there are so many, as James Surowiecki demonstrates, has to do with the success of the unproven claim that while a person may be smart, people are stupid.” One might call this a class prejudice that the more powerful and highly educated minority have against the majority of ordinary people, often pejoratively lumped together as “the masses.” For the elite, who quite naturally consider their rule and their rules to be the best (being themselves the aristoi, the aristocracy), voting and hence democracy equals “mob rule,’ and anyone who says otherwise is decried as a “populist” “Mob rule” has to be the most enduring slur against democracy since the “storming” of the Bastille by a “mob” in 1789, and a charge that democracy believers feel they have to constantly fend off. What Surowiecki goes on to show is that in this face-off between snobs and mobs, diverse groups of ordinary people turn out to be better decision makers than elites so long as certain preconditions are in place, namely diversity, independence, decentralization, and a well-thought-out aggregating mechanism for collecting and tabulating the results of individual “votes” (whether for a candidate, restaurant, or football team). It’s a fascinating and upbeat study if one is a democracy believer, as Surowiecki would seem to be. His concluding chapter, “Democracy: Dreams of the Common Good,” strikes a hopeful note in the key of Tocqueville one could say.

[Democracy] is not a way of solving cognition problems or a mechanism for revealing the public interest. But it is a way of dealing with (if not solving once and for all) the most fundamental problems of cooperation and coordination. How do we live together? How can living together work out to our mutual benefit? Democracy helps people answer those questions because the democratic experience is an experience of not getting everything you want. Its an experience of seeing your opponent win and get what you hoped to have, and of accepting it, because you believe that they will not destroy the things you value and because you know you will have another chance to get what you want. In that sense, a healthy democracy inculcates the virtues of compromise—and change. The decisions that democracies make may not determine the wisdom of the crowd. The decision to make them democratically does. (271, my emphasis).

Surowieckïs conclusion gets to the heart of the most complex and interesting sense of democracy—democracy as a way of life and a belief system—that Tocqueville spent most of his time in Volume Two of Democracy in America presenting and explaining to his largely skeptical French readership. In that second companion volume Tocqueville devotes many chapters to the new kinds of relationships that develop between demolanders. Living democratically, as Surowiecki underlines, involves a belief in certain shared core values between oneself and one’s fellow man (e.g., honesty is the best policy, cheating and dehumanization are wrong, being a gracious winner and a good loser is right) despite individual differences of taste or direction, as well as a commitment to the open-ended, ongoing debate (because circumstances are constantly changing) over the virtues and defects of specific policies and preferences. In a democracy “tomorrow is another day,’ as Margaret Mitchell had Scarlett say in 1936 about life in 1865. Positions and perspectives may (can / are allowed to) change. The eccentric Spartan Yankee Thoreau knew this when he concluded Walden with the stirring words, “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

Tocqueville says something similar in the concluding paragraphs of Democracy in America when he compares his own partial view of the world to that of the “Almighty Eternal Being, whose eye necessarily encompasses all things and sees the entire human race and each man distinctly yet simultaneously.’ In the following two paragraphs Tocqueville affirms a natural religion whose core tenet—similar to Thoreau’s credo and to a «

Emerson's “transparent eyeball” declaration from Nature (1836)—is to respect the equal dignity of all life. He confesses his reflex to condemn what, from his perspective, may strike him as decadent or painful, and he affirms his effort to adopt the universal perspective that democracy presupposes and reaffirms at every turn.

It is natural to believe that what is most satisfying to the eye of man’s creator and keeper is not the singular prosperity of a few but the greater well-being of all: what seems decadence to me is therefore progress in his eyes; what pains me pleases him. Equality is less lofty, perhaps, but more just, and its justice is the source of its grandeur and beauty.

I am doing my best to enter into this point of view, which is that of the Lord, and trying to consider and judge human affairs from this perspective. (DA II, 401, G833)

Tocqueville’s God, therefore, is a democrat, not a Platonist or republican, and Tocqueville, by the work he seems to have done on himself in overcoming certain ingrained aristocratic tendencies while retaining others, invites us on a similar journey of self renewal via questioning, rethinking, and ultimately a leap of faith and trust.”

In the following pages we shall see that democracy, like a loving marriage or close friendship, can be not only a way of life—a religion or reliance on another person or people—but also a kind of therapy, a repairing of the connection with our lost self, with others, especially a “significant other,’ and with the larger world that we all need and desire. I have become newly persuaded of this universal desire for connection from reading, of all things, a self-help “guide for couples” by Harville Hendrix and his wife Helen Lakelly Hunt, Getting the Love You Want (2008).

Above all else, we seek connection—with parts of ourselves that we have repressed, with other people, and with the larger universe. We cannot experience life in its fullness unless we have an intimate relationship with another human being and, beyond that, a feeling of connection with the world around us. (xvii-xix)

I can imagine Tocqueville going along with this affirmation since getting the love you want is not all that different from a cooperative approach to getting the governance you want. Because of its valorization of horizontal, cooperative relations among co-equals (as opposed to vertical relations between superiors and subordinates—however necessary those may also be in certain circumstances) democracy, more than any other form of government or way of life, favors feelings of ordinary dignity and connection. In its most nontrivial sense, but also that which is most controversial and controversy creating, democracy, like the new language codes that are the currency of our Internet age, is an open-ended, ever-changing system that advances or declines according to cause and effect relationships that are difficult if not impossible to direct or determine at one go or from a single position—a fact that some may find aggravating, but to democrats who recognize both the infinity and the fallibility of the private man, it is the saving grace that has so far kept us from making too many unrepairable mistakes and allowed us to continue to build new connections and honor some old ones.