A Warning from the 19th Century Revisited
The Clarion Call
As with most things, the 2012 election’s outcome should be examined through the lens of a decidedly historical interpretation. Therefore, we shall seek the answers to our questions in the past, for our upcoming future was predicted more than a century ago, and by a foreigner at that.
During his travels across the United States, which was still in its embryonic stages during the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville’s aristocratic convictions were challenged by the utterly unique and exceptional political culture he encountered here on the bustling North American continent. There can be little doubt that he was impressed with the economic opportunities associated with upward social mobility offered in the States, and found stimulating the narrative of the “Common Man”, which was embodied in the life of the illustrious President Andrew Jackson.
But Tocqueville did not hesitate to express some disquiet about what he defined as the potential for the “tyranny of the majority” to dominate and for the emergence of a so-called neo-aristocracy of manufactures which might tyrannize the citizenry. These worries have been exhaustively and tirelessly discussed by academics in the intervening years and will be ignored here.
But one of Tocqueville’s less publicized reservations concerned the vulnerability of the democratic citizenry itself. His warnings undoubtedly bear quite heavily on the electoral happenings which recently swept the US and bear just as severely on the cultural implications we can now clearly observe.
He asked: Would Americans grow so obsessed with the promises of upward social mobility and the hypnotic narrative of “equality” that they would ultimately be willing to sacrifice their liberties to an all-encompassing and ostensibly benevolent mega-state in exchange for promises to secure their material comfort and protect them from the rigors of the civic landscape? After all, if the citizenry is so moved by its infatuation with material acquisitions and personal effects, it would surely be prone to voluntarily surrender its agency and power to the government in order to secure the abundant benefits of the state. Tocqueville feared that the people would be bribed.
Indeed, promised Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the day would come when conditions would motivate the citizenry to turn in complete exasperation, after shallow disillusionment with “freedom”, and eagerly seek to inaugurate the rise of an “‘immense and tutelary power”, which “takes it upon itself” to “secure [their] gratifications, and [which would] watch over [their] fate.” Hoping to be parented and spoon fed for the sake of placating their growing list of petty tastes and material demands, the citizenry would sow the seeds of its own future domination by willingly surrendering its powers to an expansive, growing, parentally benevolent guardian.
Hence, the citizens will embrace a culture of dependence by becoming co-conspirators in their own undoing: the state will in effect “keep [them] in perpetual childhood” out of overweening concern for their own welfare.
Instead of relying on individual initiative and self-determination, the democratic citizenry can now be said to hail the state as its “sole agent and the only arbiter of [its] happiness.” This scenario is pitifully ironic (and sounds remarkably familiar to modern observers), because the formerly free citizens shall slowly slide into a state of firm dependence on its overlords ruling the state apparatus, and this robs them of their free thinking and freely-wielded faculties, and hence “free agency” is the primary and ultimate victim of this new arrangement: “Thus it everyday renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.” It “reduces [them] to be nothing better than a flock of timid […] animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Tocqueville’s clairvoyance clearly extended to the 21st century. He accurately envisioned the emergence of an all-encompassing nanny state that would, in the spirit of benevolence, “provide for their security, foresee and supply their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manage their principal concerns, direct their industry, regulate their descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances. What remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.”
In light of the Frenchman’s warnings, we can now declare with confidence that the foundation of the American political tradition has irreparably shifted its course and, frankly, its cultural trajectory, just as was predicted. The bulk of the American electorate now appears to no longer be motivated by the stout and reliable ethos of rugged individualism, personal agency, and self-reliance. The recent election’s results bespeak the fundamental sentiment of our new national character, one we can now characterize as the cheerful surrender of our national exceptionalism.
Once animated and spiritually motivated by promises premised on the principles of free enterprise and cultural independence from external societal “assistance” (mostly Federal interference), key demographics of the American political community have enthusiastically celebrated the replacement of the entrepreneurial culture with both the entitlement culture and the victimization narrative (the culture of excuse-making). They now insist upon the rapid acceleration of policies consistent with Cultural Marxism. They now embrace what Tocqueville astutely branded “perpetual childhood”. The cozy crib of the ostensibly benevolent governmental parent is simply too irresistible. Contrasting the two philosophies, Tocqueville wrote, “That power is absolute […] provident […] and its object [is] to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided that they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors”— meanwhile, the skills of its citizens atrophy due to open refusal to cultivate and work in the name of self-reliance and personal autonomy. Independence be damned!
In short, the once venerated narrative of personal initiative was utterly rejected in a second straight election. What is more, policies geared toward empowering both the private sector and the private citizenry to innovatively cultivate its ingenuity through aggressive removal of restrictive and burdensome impositions by the government seem to have been successfully rebuffed. Terms like “job creation”, “personal responsibility” and “self reliance” are either scoffed at or construed as selfishly provincial concepts. Any statesmen caught using them are dismissed, ruthlessly belittled, dubbed heartless, denounced as cruel and greedy, and altogether condemned as anachronistic.
The children of the entitlement culture yearn for the expansion of their safety net regardless of the costs, regardless of the price their own creative capacities experience. Eagerly seeking gratification from their bureaucratic parents, they now wallow in the culture of dependence, perpetual childhood and voluntary surrender of their own abilities, and await the spoils of class antagonism. This seems reminiscent of what Tocqueville brands timid flocks of animals refusing to elevate themselves to manhood (workhood).
Hence, the steadily intensifying vilification of the tradition of robustly individualistic self-reliance has become mainstream rhetorical fodder for the consumption of the masses and election campaigns of cunning public officials (not statesmen). We are helpless to deny that for decades our academic establishment, our elite press outlets, and our entertainment mediums (popular culture) have cleverly pursued a strategy aimed toward undermining the cornerstones of self-reliance by large and expanding segments of the electorate. These new segments are nothing more than “an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives”, as Tocqueville warned. They voluntarily sow the seeds of their own subservience, and have become the enthusiastic architects of their own spiritual degradation.
Roberto Matos is a sophomore in the School of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at rlm387@ cornell.edu.