Happy Birthday Alexis de Tocqueville!

Jacques-Louis David showing his lack of painterly imagination in the 1824 Mars being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. Tocqueville really didn't know much about art. Image via Wikipedia.

A new superlatively bad writer, Arthur Milikh, assistant director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, celebrating the 210th birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville on July 29 (or 225th in the original version, as you can see from the URL) in the Daily Dogwhistle Signal:

We often boast about having attained some unimaginable redefinition of ourselves and our nation.

Do you now? What gets you in the mood? Asking for a friend.

How odd, then, that someone born 210 years ago today could understand us with more clarity and depth than we understand ourselves.

I suppose if his redefinition was imaginable it would probably have more clarity than the unimaginable one. Depth is harder to measure, but why not?

Back in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville accurately foresaw both much of what ails us and our remarkable uniqueness and strengths.

Like the way he foresaw that the Union would split up permanently as soon as any state decided it wanted to secede, because the federal government was naturally too weak to stop it and wouldn't even try?*

No, no, young Arthur has another bit in mind:

Despite his hopes for America, Tocqueville thought grave obstacles would diminish our freedom—though he didn’t think them insurmountable. Most alarming to him was the power of the majority, which he thought would distort every sphere of human life.

Ah, yes, the potential tyranny, as Tocqueville saw it, quoting Madison's Federalist 51, of the state governments, whose constitutions failed to achieve the balance of power created for the federal government,** and whose populations were too lacking in social, economic, and religious diversity to avoid a majoritarian despotism.***

We've seen something like that in our own time, come to think of it, in certain states with a kind of monolithic ethnic-religious majority imposing their very strict views on sexuality on the population, or on labor organizing, or on environmental preservation from the energy industry, or voting rights for the minority. Too bad the federal government was so weak, right?

Not that Tocqueville saw any clear danger of that, or of an old-fashioned European tyranny of throwing people in dungeons and silencing the press for that matter; he seems to have been mainly concerned by a tyranny of opinion in each state, in which people could say whatever they liked but hesitated to say anything that the majority would find disagreeable. The old monarchical tyranny inspired heroic resistance and sublime poetry—the new republican tyranny inspired a servile courtier spirit in which nobody would ever achieve any intellectual distinction, at least nobody Tocqueville met.

Moreover, Tocqueville feared that the majority’s tastes and opinions would occupy every sphere of sentiment and thought. One among many illuminating examples is his commentary on democratic art. He foresaw that the majority would have no taste for portraying great human beings doing great deeds.

Actually he felt something like that (but less fascist-sounding) had already happened among the Dutch artists of the 17th century and the French of the Revolutionary period: "Raphael wanted to make of man something superior to man; he undertook to beautify beauty itself.... The painters of the Renaissance generally sought great subjects, above them or far away in time, who would allow a vast scope to their imaginations." But Jacques-Louis "David and his pupils made wondrous representations of the models they had before their eyes, but rarely imagined anything beyond themselves.... Our painters often set themselves to making exact reproductions of the details of private life that they constantly have in front of their eyes."****

But in modern democracies, art would go in the direction of the majority’s tastes: it would be abstract, focused on color and shape.

Why? Because to experience this kind of art, one needs to only have senses, whereas to experience the art of the past, one needs an education in the classics—the Bible and ancient literature especially. It’s easy to pontificate about Jackson Pollock, while it’s difficult to understand Michelangelo.

What is it you guys have with Jackson Pollock? He's been dead for 60 years! He has no followers! Representational art came back in the 60s! And as we've seen, no, you're really projecting like crazy; these complaints have nothing to do with Tocqueville, who thought art in the 19th century was too realistic. There is no reference to pictorial abstraction or focus on color (such as was practiced by his contemporaries Corot or Turner, whom Tocqueville, who gives the impression he thinks David is the latest thing, may well never have heard of) anywhere in the book.

Camille Corot, The Citadel at Volterra, 1834.

Tocqueville foresaw an “immense tutelary power”—the modern state—which would degrade men rather than destroy their bodies. Over time, he feared, the state would take away citizens’ free will, their capacity to think and act, reducing them to “a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”

Not in America, he didn't. This is drawn from the last section of the 1840 Part II of La Démocratie en Amérique, arguing that "Among the European Nations of Our Time Sovereign Power is Growing, Though Sovereigns are Less Stable". It is about what he saw happening at that moment in the soft-monarchical regime of Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King, under his "benevolent paternalism", vaguely expressed because it wasn't safe to say it too clearly.***** Wasn't anything like what he had seen in the United States in the Jacksonian democracy, or anything he had foreseen there, which, as we have seen, was the possibility of anarchy brought on by the increasing inability of the government in Washington to control the states.

Well, enough of this ignorant clown, of whom I'm sure we'll be hearing more.

I'm feeling strangely affectionate toward old Tocqueville, partly because of his contempt for Andrew Jackson,

the general the Americans have chosen twice to lead them, a man of violent character and mediocre abilities; nothing in the course of his career had ever shown that he had the needed qualities for governing a free people. In fact, most of the enlightened classes of the country have always been against him. Who then placed him in the presidential seat? The memory of one victory he won, twenty years ago, beneath the walls of New Orleans."******

And his very deft summary of the Nullification Crisis, furiously dismissive of the legally ill-informed South Carolinians, and very admiring of the political skill and deep principle of the Whig leader Henry Clay in resolving the crisis.

Everybody thinks of Tocqueville as this magisterially objective foreign observer, but it strikes me that he was actually pretty partisan, with his enthusiasm for industrialization, and his dislike for slavery; he was a Whig himself, temperamentally, and a part of the long American tradition from Whiggery through Radical Republicanism to progressivism, and we ought to be reclaiming him from these idiot conservatives and loony exceptionalists who treat him as a totem ancestor.

And in fact his pained prediction for an America caught up in the Jacksonian stupidity, that the federal government would just keep getting weaker and less able to deal with the states, had a Whiggish, optimistic but:

I believe, however, that we are still far away from the point where the federal government, unable to protect its own existence and provide the country with peace, will snuff itself out in some way of its own accord. The Union is part of the national mores, people want it; its results are evident, its blessings visible. When people realize that the weakness of the federal government is compromising the Union's existence, I have no doubt that we will see a movement of reaction in favor of strength.*******

And so, indeed, it has been, with the rise of the Radical Republicans in the 1850s, with the Progressive movement of the turn to the 20th century, with the New Deal, and maybe now, or over the last few years since the twin debacles of Baghdad and Lehman Brothers: the people demand that Washington bring some order into the chaos, and Washington tries, slowly and grudgingly, to take some ownership of the situation, tamping down the tyrannies of majorities all over the continent. I hope it's happening again!

Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952. 

* Il me paraît donc certain que si une portion de l'Union voulait sérieusement se séparer de l'autre, non seulement on ne pourrait pas l'en empêcher, mais on ne tenterait même pas de le faire. L'Union actuelle ne durera donc qu'autant que tous les États qui la composent continueront à vouloir en faire partie. (Démocratie en Amérique I/10)

** If the principles [of the separation of powers] on which these observations are founded be just, as I persuade myself they are, and they be applied as a criterion to the several State constitutions, and to the federal Constitution it will be found that if the latter does not perfectly correspond with them, the former are infinitely less able to bear such a test. (Federalist 51)

*** It can be little doubted that if the State of Rhode Island was separated from the Confederacy and left to itself, the insecurity of rights under the popular form of government within such narrow limits would be displayed by such reiterated oppressions of factious majorities that some power altogether independent of the people would soon be called for by the voice of the very factions whose misrule had proved the necessity of it. In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good; whilst there being thus less danger to a minor from the will of a major party, there must be less pretext, also, to provide for the security of the former, by introducing into the government a will not dependent on the latter, or, in other words, a will independent of the society itself. It is no less certain than it is important, notwithstanding the contrary opinions which have been entertained, that the larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government. (Federalist 51)

**** Je doute que Raphaël ait fait une étude aussi approfondie des moindres ressorts du corps humain que les dessinateurs de nos jours. Il n'attachait pas la même importance qu'eux à la rigoureuse exactitude sur ce point, car il prétendait surpasser la nature. Il voulait faire de l'homme quelque chose qui fût supérieur à l'homme. Il entreprenait d'embellir la beauté même.

David et ses élèves étaient, au contraire, aussi bons anatomistes que bons peintres. Ils représentaient merveilleusement bien les modèles qu'ils avaient sous les yeux, mais il était rare qu'ils imaginassent rien au-delà; ils suivaient exactement la nature, tandis que Raphaël cherchait mieux qu'elle. Ils nous ont laissé une exacte peinture de l'homme mais le premier nous fait entrevoir la Divinité dans ses oeuvres.

On peut appliquer au choix même du sujet ce que j'ai dit de la manière de le traiter.

Les peintres de la Renaissance cherchaient d'ordinaire au-dessus d'eux, ou loin de leur temps, de grands sujets qui laissassent à leur imagination une vaste carrière. Nos peintres mettent souvent leur talent à reproduire exactement les détails de la vie privée qu'ils ont sans cesse sous les yeux, et ils copient de tous côtés de petits objets qui n'ont que trop d'originaux dans la nature. (Démocratie en Amérique II/1:11)

***** Je veux imaginer sous quels traits nouveaux le despotisme pourrait se produire dans le monde: je vois une foule innombrable d'hommes semblables et égaux qui tournent sans repos sur eux-mêmes pour se procurer de petits et vulgaires plaisirs, dont ils emplissent leur âme. Chacun d'eux, retiré à l'écart, est comme étranger à la destinée de tous les autres: ses enfants et ses amis particuliers forment pour lui toute l'espèce humaine; quant au demeurant de ses concitoyens, il est à côté d'eux, mais il ne les voit pas; il les touche et ne les sent point; il n'existe qu'en lui-même et pour lui seul, et, s'il lui reste encore une famille, on peut dire du moins qu'il n'a plus de patrie. Au-dessus de ceux-là s'élève un pouvoir immense et tutélaire, qui se charge seul d'assurer leur jouissance et de veiller sut leur sort. il est absolu, détaillé, régulier, prévoyant et doux. Il ressemblerait à la puissance paternelle si, comme elle, il avait pour objet de préparer les hommes à l'âge viril; mais il ne cherche, au contraire, qu'à les fixer irrévocablement dans l'enfance... (Démocratie en Amérique II/4:6)

****** Le général Jackson que les Américains ont choisi deux fois pour le placer à leur tête, est un homme d'un caractère violent et d'une capacité moyenne; rien dans tout le cours de sa carrière n'avait jamais prouvé qu'il eût les qualités requises pour gouverner un peuple libre: aussi la majorité des classes éclairées de l'Union lui a toujours été contraire. Qui donc l'a placé sur le siège du Président et l'y maintient encore ? Le souvenir d'une victoire remportée par lui, il y a vingt ans, sous les murs de la Nouvelle-Orléans; or, cette victoire de la Nouvelle-Orléans est un fait d'armes fort ordinaire dont on ne saurait s'occuper longtemps que dans un pays où l'on ne donne point de batailles. (Démocratie en Amérique I/2:10)

******* Je crois cependant que nous sommes encore loin du temps où le pouvoir fédéral, incapable de protéger sa propre existence et de donner la paix au pays, s'éteindra en quelque sorte de lui-même. L'Union est dans les mœurs, on la désire; ses résultats sont évidents, ses bienfaits visibles. Quand on s'apercevra que la faiblesse du gouvernement fédéral compromet l'existence de l'Union, je ne doute point qu'on ne voie naître un mouvement de réaction en faveur de la force. (Démocratie en Amérique I/2:10)