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altogether. Moreover, history bursts with examples of triumphant democratic revolutions and movements hijacked by self-aggrandizing masterminds, who then commit their societies to tyrannical purposes; or the victorious dividing the spoils of a war won and taking for themselves power and wealth. But through it all, the Founders maintained their integrity and remained true to the revolution’s purposes. None of the states were compelled to join the union, but all did. And the debates and decisions in the Constitutional Convention and the state ratifying conventions were always about the best ways to protect and promote the civil society and the liberties and rights of the individual, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws as an outstanding reference, never before had a nation been so thoroughly engaged in such an extraordinary venture.

It is obvious that at every turn, the Constitution’s Framers repudiated by words and actions—as did Montesquieu and Locke—the utopian designs of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, and Hobbes’s Leviathan, all of which had been known to them. Although Marx’s Communist Manifesto would come later, the debates and decisions of the Framers, and the Constitution itself, make abundantly clear that they would have been no more enticed by the dogma of the “workers’ paradise” than by any other form of tyranny disguised as utopia.

CHAPTER TEN

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE WAS a French thinker and philosopher who lived from 1805 to 1859, and was greatly influenced by Montesquieu. He wrote Democracy in America, which actually combines two volumes—the first written in 1835 and the second written in 1840—based on his travels around America. Whereas Locke and Montesquieu, among others, provided the essential intellectual guidance to America’s Founders and Framers, Tocqueville’s insightful observations about democracy, and particularly the American Republic, several decades after its establishment, are prescient predictions about both the strengths of the American character as well as the allure and peril of what I broadly and repeatedly describe as utopianism.

VOLUME I

Tocqueville wrote, “Many important observations suggest themselves upon the social condition of the Anglo-Americans; but there is one that takes precedent of all the rest. The social condition of the Americans is eminently democratic; this was its character at the foundation of the colonies, and it is still more strongly marked at the present day.”1

He observed, “In America the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence on the course of affairs. The democratic principle, on the contrary, has gained so much strength by time, by events, and by legislation, as to have become not only predominant, but all-powerful. No family or corporate authority can be perceived; very often one cannot even discover in it any very lasting individual influence” (I, 52–53).

In America, Tocqueville saw equality, properly comprehended—that is, in the context of inalienable rights—and as practiced nowhere else. “America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon. Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has perceived the remembrance” (I, 53).

Tocqueville explained, however, that the danger threatening yet motivating most societies is the miscomprehension of equality, resulting in their descent into centralized tyranny. Rather than embracing equality as a condition of natural law and inalienable rights, which underlie a free and diverse society, equality is misapplied politically in the form of radical egalitarianism and to promote equal social and economic outcomes. “There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion