Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [69]
Tocqueville lauded the American system as antithetical to radical egalitarianism, for it limits federal intervention to certain general matters of national consequence and leaves to local decision-making the countless minor affairs of communities. However, he also distinguished centralized government and egalitarianism from the common interests, shared values, and regular interactions that make “a people.” Tocqueville wrote, “The Americans have combated by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it. The legislators of America did not suppose that a general representation of the whole nation would suffice to ward off a disorder at once so natural to the frame of democratic society and so fatal; they also thought that it would be well to infuse political life into each portion of the territory in order to multiply to an infinite extent opportunities of acting in concert for all the members of the community and to make them constantly feel their mutual dependence. The plan was a wise one. The general affairs of a country engage the attention only of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the same places; and as they often lose sight of each other afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them. But if the object be to have the local affairs of a district conducted by the men who reside there, the same persons are always in contact, and they are, in a manner, forced to be acquainted and to adapt themselves to one another” (II, 103). Moreover, local decision-making binds citizens together within communities, for they are more attentive and active in the affairs that directly affect them and the well-being of their neighbors. “Thus far more may be done by entrusting to the citizens the administration of minor affairs than by surrendering them in the public welfare and convincing them that they constantly stand in need of one another in order to provide for it.… Local freedom, then, which leads a great number of citizens to value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred, perpetually brings men together and forces them to help one another in spite of the propensities that sever them” (II, 104).
While rightly decrying the despotism of radical egalitarianism, Tocqueville also recognized that the American economic system—with its voluntary commercial interactions and the individual’s right to acquire and retain property—creates more wealth and opportunity for more people than any other system. Indeed, in America, there are no permanent social or economic classes condemning people to a life of poverty or ensuring for others great wealth for all time. As such, the American economic system encourages success and discourages as self-defeating the plundering of the successful. “I am aware that among a great democratic people there will always be some members of the community in great poverty and others in great opulence; but the poor, instead of forming the immense majority of the nation, as is always the case in aristocratic communities, are comparatively few in number, and the laws do not bind them together by the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury.… As there is no longer a race of poor men, so there is no longer a race of rich men; the latter spring up daily from the multitude and relapse into it again. Hence, they do not form a distinct class which may be easily marked out and plundered; and, moreover, as they are connected with the mass of their fellow citizens by a thousand secret ties, the people cannot assail them without inflicting an injury upon themselves” (II, 252).
Tocqueville observed that in America, the vast majority of people are neither poor nor rich, they desire but are not obsessed with becoming rich, and they are loyal to a stable yet free system in which they are able to benefit and have