Absentee despotism

James thinks that the present state of American democracy proves that Alexis was mistaken:

Peter Lawler has said what I’m about to say before, but it’s important enough to repeat: Tocqueville’s fear of soft despotism as the future of American democracy turned out to be simply wrong. (It’s much more a problem in Europe, strangely enough.) Americans are more independent, rootless, and on their own than ever. Neither the very young nor the very old hold families together like they used to be able to do, at least out of a ’sense of’ obligation. The hypermobilization into which you must be socialized to ’succeed’ (move across the country for college, move across the country for your first job/law school, move across the country to wherever ‘the best opportunity’ is to be found) makes putting down roots not only pointless but counterproductive. The massive growth of government spending, even entitlement spending, reflects if anything a hands-off approach to despotism — with the federal government as a deadbeat dad who sometimes sends you a birthday card or a five-dollar bill.

I am puzzled, and plan to be only very slightly hyperbolic in explaining why. If the political triumph of an essentially unaccountable cabal composed overwhelmingly of wealthy elites who protect their jobs by gerrymandering the vote, take away and spend our money in steadily increasing volumes, employ a greater number of workers than any other industry in the nation (does being one of those lucky 2% who work for the feds mean that you are not under Uncle Sam’s thumb?), and ultimately occupy one half of their time in telling us how to grow, buy, sell, and eat our food, breathe our air, drive our bikes, cars, and motorcycles, and birth, medicate, raise, and school our kids, another half holding Senate hearings on the intricacies of professional sports and coming up with solutions to problems that only they could have created in the first place, the third half (you heard that right) inventing new standards, subsidies, regulations, tax loopholes, and price controls to benefit entrenched corporate interests keep the economy healthy, and the fourth (yes, there are four halves to this story) listening to our phone calls, reading our mail, checking our credit card statements, and sending us off to fight in foreign wars, does not amount to soft despotism, then I do not know what does. Sure, you can pack up your things and live, learn, and work wherever you want to, but buckle your seat belt, put on your helmet, strap in and shoot up the kids, give up your pot, and don’t even think about arranging flowers without a license. In James’s eyes, perhaps, for which the natural measure is provided by our present-day brethren across the Pond, this may count as something less than despotism, but by Tocqueville’s standards? It is hard for me to imagine that the Great Visitor, having taken stock of the present state of American society, would describe us as anything other than a people who

believe that in each state the social power ought to emanate directly from the people; but once that power is constituted, they imagine so to speak no limits to it; they willingly recognize that it has the right to do anything.

As for the particular privileges granting to towns, families, or individuals, they have lost even the idea of them. Their minds have never foreseen that one might not apply the same law uniformly to all parts of the same state and to all men inhabiting it.

And again, we are those who

having neither superiors nor inferiors nor habitual and necessary associates, willingly fall back on themselves and consider themselves in isolation. …

It is therefore never effortless for these men to tear themselves away from their particular affairs to occupy themselves with common affairs; their natural inclination is to abandon the care of the latter to the sole visible and permanent representative of common interests, which is the state.

Not only do they not naturally have the taste to occupy themselves with the public, but often they lack the time to do it. Private life is so active in democratic times, so agitated, so filled with desires and work, that hardly any energy or leisure remains to each man for political life.

And so on. And note that Tocqueville did predict that the same sorts of phenomena would increasingly manifest themselves in France and England, as indeed he observed they already had.

As worrisome as it is, then, to disagree with James on a thinker about whom he knows so much more than me, and infinitely moreso to disagree with Prof. Lawler, the power of a good rant compels me. This is the face of the great red, white, and blue Leviathan, my friends, and we the tiny bodies that make him up. That he comes across as a lazy and deadbeat dad who does nothing more than send the occasional stimulus check is but an illusion generated by the fact that he has millions of eager minions to do the dirty work for him.

Filed under: government/law