Impressions from a first reading of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, vol 1

I just finished reading the first tome of Alexis de Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique. It is, of course, a classic work, and it would be worth very little to add yet another summary or review to the cybersphere. On the other hand, I thought it would be worthwhile to write down the strongest impressions it made on my own thinking. There's nothing quite like learning about your own country from a point of view that comes from both a different era and a different continent. Here I will write a point by point list of the ideas that stuck with me most strongly.

• The United States can be rightfully called a Christian nation. This has not so much to do with the Constitution or the Founding Fathers, and everything to do with the original colonists, their culture, their beliefs, and their mission. Religion was everywhere in early America, much like today, though it is in a slow decline. It was not just a matter of personal belief, but it shaped laws and cultural norms. In particular, the education of children was highly shaped by Christian belief.
• Despite the mix of cultures, the USA is still very much an Anglo-Saxon nation. Its political and legal traditions have the same roots as those of England. Democracy in America was not an 18th century invention. It was a 17th century evolution. That is, the colonists put into practice what they already knew, and whatever innovation they came up with was learned from experience in their new circumstances.
• There was, from the very beginning, a pretty significant divide between the North and South. In some ways, the Civil War seems kind of inevitable in retrospect. This doesn't seem to be the result of profound cultural differences, but rather circumstances which caused political interests to be rather divided. I think we all know which was the biggest difference.
• Concerning slavery: it was already well-recognized at that time (the 1830's) that slavery hindered economic improvement. I found it particularly fascinating that Tocqueville would argue quite explicitly that the North ended slavery for economic reasons.
• Racism was just a given, North and South. In fact--and I admit this was a real discovery for me--Tocqueville argues it was in many ways worse in the North, precisely because there was no slavery (strange as that seems). Indeed, without the institution of slavery keeping blacks and whites legally separated, white people separated themselves from black people all the more carefully. And of course this racism wasn't against blacks only, but also against the indegenous people of America. The difference is that black people lived among whites, whereas the indigenous people were outsiders.
  Tocqueville said that if slavery ever ended in the South, there would be a huge struggle between the black and white races. It seems he was right.
• Freedom was not considered to be a state of nature. People had to learn how to be free. Certain morals were required for a free society. In short, freedom was the result of civilization.
  In some ways this feeds into my previous point, because if you don't consider a certain race civilized enough, then they can't really be free, either.
• Americans enjoyed remarkable equality of possessions and status, even though they didn't explicitly seek it.
• Americans believed in freedom: all people where free to choose in whatever concerned only themselves, and likewise for each city, county, and state (in relation to other cities, counties, and states). This is a point on which Tocqueville insists over and over again, calling it the principle on which the entire American society was based.
• The union was, in Tocqueville's opinion, fairly loose: in one place he said the federal government seemed to be losing control over the states. Things have certainly changed since 1835.
• Actually, an interesting example of the previous point had to do with American interactions with the indigenous peoples. The individual states were actually worse than the federal government, though both acted in bad faith. In theory, the federal government should have been responsible for interactions with foreign peoples, but individual states got rather impatient when it came to chasing tribes off of lands they wanted.
• Tocqueville was pretty certain America was going to become a global superpower. I don't have the historical knowledge to say whether he was unique in this, but I found his predictions kind of impressive. For instance, in one place he says that 100 years from his writing, the US would have at least 100 million people. His first volume was published in 1835. The US population broke 100 million in 1915, and in 1935 it was around 127 million. Not bad.
• The American president was a relatively powerless figure in Tocqueville's opinion. On the other hand, he said this had nothing to do with the Constitution, and everything to do with circumstances. At the time the US had relatively few military opponents. Any country surrounded by enemies will inevitably have to set up a strong executive.
  I think the experience of the US over the past century or so confirms, in a disturbing way, exactly what Tocqueville said.

Some of these points deserve more developed reflection, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of other things that jumped out at me, but that's a start.

First impressions on reading Democracy in America

I've always wanted to read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and now I'm taking advantage of my new-found French speaking ability to read the book in French. I haven't gotten very far, but I already have some pretty striking impressions. Here they are.

• Despite claims to the contrary, it seems pretty legitimate after all to say America is in some sense a Christian nation. Sure, you can point to the theology of the Founding Fathers and say, "Hey, it's all just deism," but Tocqueville is more concerned with the angloamericans who founded places like New England. You can't look at the early settlements without seeing an explicit reference to Christian beliefs in both their goals and even their laws. If "the founders" are people like Washington and Jefferson, then okay, maybe we're just a deist nation. But if "the founders" are the Anglo-Saxons who first came to America, then we are definitely a Christian nation.
• Tocqueville's general comments on religion strike me as true today just as they were during the Enlightenment: religion was originally the friend of freedom and equality, then it became an ironic enemy, but in many ways it is still a friend and should be more so. The narrative he tells is something like this: Christian beliefs gave people access to a higher power than political power and a belief in inherent human dignity that transcends culture. This was the first step toward defeating tyranny. The next step is democracy, which Tocqueville seems to be best displayed in America, particularly New England.
• Freedom is not the ability to whatever you want, but rather the ability to do what is right. Tocqueville thus speaks highly of the strong (and religiously motivated) emphasis on education, which he says fosters freedom in the new republic.
• Townships are the nexus of democracy. Americans in the eyes of Tocqueville are successful in democracy because they build it from the ground up. In fact, Tocqueville marvels precisely at how active the local government is in the life of the people, in contrast to his own French government.
• Tocqueville gives one of the best descriptions of the modern libertarian ideal you can find. America is founded on allowing individuals to be sovereign in all things which pertain only to them, and likewise for all levels of the federal structure (towns, cities, states, and finally the federal government). Thus there is as little intervention from the top as possible.
• At the same time, Tocqueville praises townships for having governments which provide an ever-expanding array of services. It may or may not be difficult to reconcile this with modern libertarianism. (Does the growth of federal government actually get in the way of healthy, active local government?)
• Equality is practically synonymous with freedom. Tocqueville insists that there is probably no group of people on earth that has ever achieved more equality of circumstances than the Anglo-Americans. Yet he also claims that they would be the last people on earth to claim that equality of wealth is a goal worth pursuing. Equality of results is, for him, an outgrowth of freedom, but it's also more than that. In some sense, it is freedom, by definition. Freedom means that no one has any special authority given from above, which is the same as equality.
• From the very beginning there was a large difference between the North and the South. A lot of people talk about "America's" guilt in tolerating slavery, but as time goes on we seem to get less and less clear on how striking the regional differences actually were. New England, for example, never had slavery. You have to wonder if we weren't asking for a Civil War just by uniting north and south under one Constitution. (None of this is to say racism didn't exist in the North.)
• Tocqueville is highly critical of slavery, not just because of its consequences for slaves (which is the obvious criticism), but also because of its consequences for society in general. It creates a society which is less free and less progressive for everyone, not just for the enslaved. I believe he says that it makes the society less industrious, which is almost certainly correct.

Some of these impressions might be off base, who knows. What I'm mostly left with is a desire to see more of the vibrant local civic life that Tocqueville seems to love so well in young America. But how do you pull that off in an increasingly transient and mobile society? How do you unite people together by common values? And is there still room in the modern world for communities formed by common religious beliefs?