II. Alexis de Tocqueville.
Like the nation of narcissists that we are, we love de Tocqueville because he wrote big books full of nice things about us. Particularly he liked our decentralized institutions and values (mores). In contrast, he also had a lot to say about the two failed attempts at political democracy in France—the French Revolution and the revolution of 1848.
For de Tocqueville, democracy wasn’t just a mode of governance but a type of society–one tending toward less aristocracy and more equality among its citizens. As society becomes more democratic in this sense, the government tends to centralize, with more authority in one body or one man. It seems paradoxical, but when everyone is relatively equal, the total despotism of an individual leader becomes easier.
De Tocqueville believed that the U.S. avoided that outcome through its strong sources of opposing power in its institutions and mores. Such values and institutions don’t arise overnight—in America, they had roots going back to at least colonial times.
In France however, centralization had increased steadily under the old monarchical regimes, and local and intermediate governmental and societal institutions had correspondingly declined. Thus, after each new revolution’s effort at political democracy, France would eventually revert to a centralized, autocratic government
A man who embodied the failure of political democracy in France for de Tocqueville was Louis Napoleon, whom his opponents saw as a political grifter who promised to make France great again. He became Emperor Napoleon III, but his vision of French imperial greatness faltered in a series of foreign and military misadventures and came to an end where French hopes would fail again 70 years later—at Sedan against the Prussians. (More on Louis Napoleon later from Marx.)
De Tocqueville famously predicted that America and Russia would eventually be great opposing powers: “One has freedom as the principal means of action; the other has servitude.” He was rooting for the American way to win.
So, how would de Tocqueville view our current regime? He may have applauded the new regime’s attack on the central government, but only if they resulted in more local governmental power and not if they led instead to power being consolidated in the executive, which appears to be the current regime’s rhetorical thrust.
He would have been dismayed that we’ve become subject to Russian influence and that so many of us are enamored with Russian authoritarianism. Such Americans seem like de Tocqueville’s description the French revolutionaries who “always understood the liberty of the people to mean the despotism exercised in the name of the people.”
Finally, de Tocqueville would have found the very idea of one man claiming the power to make America great as in itself running contrary to the very things that he admired about America, and all too reminiscent of Louis Napoleon in the run-up to his coup d’état.