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Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift
#1
"Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift"

Paul A. Rahe
Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, where he is Professor of History. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Wadham College, Oxford; received his Ph.D. in ancient history from Yale University; and has taught at Yale University, Cornell University, Franklin and Marshall College, and the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution; Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic; Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic; and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on April 7, 2009.
Conservatism in America is now at a nadir. What would happen if it were to recover? What if the friends of limited government were to make a dramatic comeback, as they did in 1938, 1946, 1966, and 1994? In January [2009], this would have seemed a pipe dream. Now, however, as the Obama administration flounders and the President’s negatives rise, the Republicans ride higher in the polls, Democratic senators from toss-up states begin to display anxiety, and citizens of all political stripes stage Tea Parties across the nation, such a scenario seems conceivable. But if this were to happen, would the advocates of limited government be ready to rule? Thus far, they have been tactically adept, and we can foresee the possibility that they will stick to their guns and refuse to become what they were before 1980: tax-collectors for a swollen welfare state. This is, however, the easy part, and there is no sign yet that anyone has given serious thought to developing a coherent program for governance. In the absence of such a strategy and a plan, as became evident almost immediately after Newt Gingrich resigned his post as Speaker of the House, those who sought and gained office as supporters of limited government will wander more or less aimlessly. Before we contemplate the future, however, we must confront an exceedingly unpleasant fact about our recent past.

For nearly a century now, the friends of liberty, local autonomy, and civic agency have been in retreat, and the administrative state has grown by leaps and bounds. The ideological foundation for this development was laid during the presidential campaign of 1912, when both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt attacked the Constitution, and William Howard Taft, its only defender, came in a dismal third. The institutional foundation was put in place one year later with the ratification of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments to the Constitution, which legalized the federal income tax and provided for the direct election of United States Senators, putting the federal government in a position to secure for itself unlimited funding, and denying to the state legislatures, which had once chosen the Senators, the capacity to defend state and local governments against federal encroachment. Since that time, almost without a respite, conservatives have been giving ground, and the advocates of centralized administration have gradually extended their tentacles into nearly every corner of public and private life.

Since 1928, the only real difference between Republicans and Democrats has been the pace. Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George W. Bush may not have been as enthusiastic about extending federal power as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Barack Obama, but they were nonetheless assiduous. Even under Ronald Reagan, the only recent President who made a concerted attempt to limit its growth, the federal government of the United States extended its reach.

Of course, the localities and the states still exist. Elections take place. There are school boards, town, city, county, and state governments; and they still matter—even if, on a great and growing variety of subjects, they take their orders from a national government that offers them vast sums in funding in return for strict compliance with its every whim. Our polity is a hodge-podge, but with every passing year the burden of federal regulation becomes more intolerable and the number of mandates with increasing rapidity grows. Moreover, nearly all of the regulations imposed are devised by unelected civil servants and political appointees to whom Congress, undeniably in breach of the Constitution’s separation of powers, has delegated legislative, executive, and judicial responsibilities; and next to nothing with regard to these is examined and voted on by elected officials who can be held responsible by the voting public for the consequences of what has been done. Moreover, what remains undecided within the administrative agencies is generally dealt with in courts unresponsive to the electorate. We may still take pride in being a self-governing people, but to an ever-increasing degree this pretense is unsustainable.

If we are ever to put a stop to the advance of the administrative state and roll it back, if we are to recover the liberty that once was ours and reassert our dignity as citizens, we must first come to understand what it is that has occasioned centralized administration’s inexorable march. Here, I would argue, Alexis de Tocqueville, who died 150 years ago on April 16, 1859, is our best guide, for what he feared with regard to his native France is increasingly true for the United States. To an ever-increasing degree, our compatriots are subject to what he described as “an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate.” As he predicted, this power is “absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle,” and it “works willingly for their happiness, but it wishes to be the only agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their testaments, divides their inheritances.” It is entirely proper to ask, as he asked, whether it can “relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and of the effort associated with living.” For such is evidently its aim.

Moreover, “after having taken each individual in this fashion by turns into its powerful hands, and after having kneaded him in accord with its desires, the sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way past the crowd and emerge into the light of day. It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own; it does not destroy; it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way, it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

As I said, when Tocqueville wrote these words he did not have our country in mind. He was worried—and rightly so—about his native France. Where other luminaries, such as François Guizot, looked forward to the rule of a technocratic elite armed with authority conferred by a liberal, quasi-democratic regime, Tocqueville anticipated something ominous: the establishment of a “social body” that would be intent on exercising foresight with regard to everything; that would act as a “second providence,” nourishing men from birth and protecting them from “perils”; and that would function as a “tutelary power” capable of rendering men “gentle” and “sociable” in such a manner that, while “crimes” would become “rare,” so would “virtues as well.” Under the rule of this “tutelary power,” he foresaw that the human “soul” would enter into a “long repose.” In the process, “individual energy” would be “almost extinguished”; and, when action was required, men would “rely on others.” In effect, a peculiar brand of “egoism” would reign, for everyone would “withdraw into himself.” If “fanaticism” disappeared, as he suspected it would, so would “convictions” and “beliefs” and human agency itself.

The new and unprecedented “species of servitude” that Tocqueville had in mind was, as he later observed, “regulated, gentle or soft, and favorable to peace,” and he suspected that it could be “combined more easily” than men were inclined to imagine “with some of the external forms of liberty.” He even suggests “that it would be possible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.” In this fashion—with the institution of a “unitary, tutelary, all-powerful” government “elected by the citizens” at regular intervals—one might actually satisfy the two contradictory impulses found among his contemporaries: the felt “need for guidance, and the longing to remain free.” What this would involve, Tocqueville explains, is a “species of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people,” a corrupt bargain between the ghost of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and that of his erstwhile admirer Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, in which the political doctrine of the former is deployed rhetorically for the purpose of legitimizing a law-abiding, steady, reliable despotism on the model of mandarin China. Under such an arrangement, Tocqueville remarked, “the citizens emerge for a moment from dependence for the purpose of indicating their masters and then re-enter,” without further ado, “their former state. They console themselves for being in tutelage with the thought that they have chosen the tutors themselves,” and “they think that they have sufficiently guaranteed the liberty of the individual when they have delivered it to the national power.”

This was the fear that Tocqueville brought with him to North America—that the great democratic revolution sweeping the globe in the wake of the American and French revolutions would eventuate not in liberty, but in a soft, gentle despotism welcomed by those subject to it. He came to these shores, hoping against hope that he would discover in our country an antidote to the process that had in France produced a Napoleon and that seemed likely to eventuate in something far less impressive than the great Bonaparte.

And here on these shores, in the United States of America, Tocqueville discovered what he was looking for. In decentralized administration, local self-government, civic associations, an unfettered press, Biblical religion, and the marital solidarity characteristic of Jacksonian America, he found what he took to be an antidote for the soft despotism that he rightly saw as democracy’s drift. Above all, he was persuaded that, where there is centralized administration and individual citizens find themselves alone facing the state, they will succumb to the disposition of uneasiness and anxiety that Blaise Pascal, the baron de Montesquieu, and Rousseau had called inquiétude and, in search of a sense of security, gradually become passive subjects who look to an all-powerful, providential, tutelary state for their welfare. But he also saw that—where there is considerable local autonomy, as there was in the United States, and the citizens experience civic agency and learn the art of association by participating in local self-government; where there is genuine and spirited public debate; where the citizens find in Biblical religion a moral anchor and the foundation for a conviction of their own dignity; and where they are sustained by domestic tranquillity within their own homes—the sense of inquiétude typical of liberal democratic man will give way to a trust in their own capacities, and they will be anything but passive and have the confidence to join together and face down officials intent on lording it over them.

One cannot today read Tocqueville’s description of Democracy in America with equanimity—for, as I have already intimated, to a considerable extent, the world that he described is lost. The states and localities are in thrall to the federal government; civic associations survive almost solely as lobbying operations; newspapers are disappearing hither and yon; Christianity and Judaism have lost their hold on much of our population; the divorce rate is shockingly high; and, last year, forty percent of all children born in this country were born out of wedlock. We cannot continue on the path we now tred and sustain a genuine democracy.

Of course, this is not the first time that the American regime has faced a great crisis. We did so once before in the 1850s and the 1860s. At a terrible cost, we managed to weather that crisis—by attending to the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, put into practical form through the Constitution, and given an authoritative interpretation in The Federalist.

Tocqueville was not entirely oblivious to this crisis when he published Democracy in America, but he did not fully appreciate it in the 1830s. He had planned to sojourn for a time in Charleston, South Carolina, but his travels in North America were cut short. Had he gone there as planned, he would have discovered that the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which he heard read out on the 4th of July in Albany, New York, were under assault. It was not until later—as evidenced in his letters (especially those written in 1850 and 1851 when he was Foreign Minister of France)—that he came more fully to appreciate the danger. We can learn something about the problem from reading Democracy in America, but Americans in the 1850s had no real need of his guidance. What was at issue was clear enough, and the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist were a sufficient guide. What was required was a reassertion of American principles.

The second crisis of the American regime is of a different character. It had its origins in the 1870s and the 1880s in the most unlikely of places—among the political offspring of Abraham Lincoln. It began within the Republican Party—within the liberal wing of evangelical Christianity—and it had its initial home in the universities. Its proponents called themselves Progressives. They inhabited institutions of higher learning constituted on the German model. They thought of themselves as scientists exploring new frontiers; they were powerfully influenced by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Right and by the social Darwinism inspired by Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. For Abraham Lincoln, almost without exception, they professed a profound reverence. But under these influences, they nonetheless abandoned as hopelessly outmoded the notion, asserted by the Founding Fathers and reasserted by Lincoln, that the Declaration of Independence embodied self-evident truths. Under these influences, they came to see the Constitution as out of date; and when the generation to which they belonged came to exercise leadership, in 1912, they advocated jettisoning both.

We do not need Tocqueville to see this apostasy as an apostasy. No one who reads the preamble to the Declaration of Independence can be comfortable with affirmative action, intrusive bureaucracy, and the suffocation of local autonomy; no one who reads the Constitution in light of The Federalist can be satisfied with our abandonment of the two great principles of self-government enshrined in that Constitution and defended in that volume: the separation of powers and federalism. Our entire tradition weighs against the administrative state. But, nonetheless, it has grown; it continues to grow under Republicans and Democrats alike; and right now it threatens to grow dramatically.

This is where Tocqueville comes in. Neither the Declaration of Independence, nor the Constitution, nor The Federalist is sufficient to enable us to understand what I will call “the nexus of tyrannical ambition and servile temptation.” The leading documents of our tradition do not address this question. Nor should they have done so. The preamble of the Declaration of Independence is a statement of first principles. It is not a fully elaborated political science. The Constitution presupposes such a political science, and much of what it presupposes is elaborated in The Federalist, but that work was produced for a particular occasion. Its aim was to encourage the ratification of the Constitution. Its authors hoped thereby to form a more perfect Union; they had no need to make the case for local autonomy; it was their task to show where its proper limits lay. As a statement of political science, The Federalist was, in consequence, incomplete. If the Framers understood the nexus of tyrannical ambition and servile temptation, they quite properly refrained from addressing it in this book.

This is why we need Tocqueville today. As his letters reveal, he came to America with a fully-worked-out account of the political psychology that gives rise to the nexus of tyrannical ambition and servile temptation. What he looked for in these parts and found was a regime equipped with the means for thwarting that ambition and resisting that temptation. His is not a book about the American regime as such. It is a book about democracy, and he uses our regime as a salutary example. Tocqueville wrote in French for a French audience; his aim was to instruct the French in what they needed to know. He had no need to mention the Declaration of Independence. First principles were not germane to his task. The French had their own Declaration, and it too embodied the principle that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. This principle he took for granted, and he alluded to its implications—for example, in discussing slavery—in much the same fashion as did The Federalist: without explicitly mentioning the Declaration of Independence, without citing chapter and verse. He did, of course, speak about the gradual discovery of the equality principle in the course of European history, and he quite rightly traced that discovery to the Christian faith and to the influence that it exercised within Europe over the course of a multitude of centuries. But he never suggested, as some suppose, that the truth of the principle of equality was in any way historically contingent.

We need to read Democracy in America as Tocqueville intended that it be read—as an adjunct to The Federalist (which he frequently cites) intended to instruct the French in virtues they still sorely lack: above all, in an appreciation for the vital significance of federalism and local self-government, the importance of civic associations and a free press, the political value of the Christian religion, and the necessity for marital harmony. We would not ourselves desperately need this adjunct to The Federalist had we remained true to our inheritance.

But now, alas, we are as much in need of Tocqueville as were the French in his own day, and we cannot understand the nexus of tyrannical ambition and servile temptation in our own country if we do not pay close attention to his account of the distinctive political psychology of liberal democratic man and of the means by which our forebears overcame democracy’s propensity to drift towards what Tocqueville called “soft despotism.”

Seventy-two years ago, in 1937, at the height of the New Deal, Walter Lippmann, a repentant progressive, noted that,

while the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. . .


Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come. . . . [T]he premises of authoritarian collectivism have become the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms, not only of all the revolutionary regimes, but of nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive.

So universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. Though despotism is no novelty in human affairs, it is probably true that at no time in twenty-five hundred years has any western government claimed for itself a jurisdiction over men’s lives comparable with that which is officially attempted in totalitarian states. . . .

But it is even more significant that in other lands where men shrink from the ruthless policy of these regimes, it is commonly assumed that the movement of events must be in the same direction. Nearly everywhere the mark of a progressive is that he relies at last upon the increased power of officials to improve the condition of men.

What worried Lippmann the most—and what should worry us still—was the failure of those who considered themselves progressives to “remember how much of what they cherish as progressive has come by emancipation from political dominion, by the limitation of power, by the release of personal energy from authority and collective coercion.” Lippmann cited “the whole long struggle to extricate conscience, intellect, labor, and personality from the bondage of prerogative, privilege, monopoly, authority.” It was, he said, “the gigantic heresy of an apostate generation” to suppose that “there has come into the world during this generation some new element which makes it necessary for us to undo the work of emancipation, to retrace the steps men have taken to limit the power of rulers, which compels us to believe that the way of enlightenment in affairs is now to be found by intensifying authority and enlarging its scope.” It is with Lippmann’s warning in mind that we should resume our attempt to understand the present discontents in light of what we can learn from Alexis de Tocqueville, whose passing we commemorate this year.
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