Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are doing
something a little bit different. Usually we
look at a specific event or, you know, a modern
trend, something ripped from the headlines. But
today we're essentially sitting down. with a
time traveler. That is a very evocative way to
put it. And honestly, it's not really an exaggeration.
It feels true, doesn't it? I mean, we are looking
at a man who walked around the United States
in the 1830s. Yeah. We're talking about a world
of muddy roads, stagecoaches, steamboats, the
very, very early frontier, a world where the
telegraph was barely even an idea. Right. A completely
different planet in some ways. And yet when you
read his work today. Here in the 2020s, it feels
like he's scrolling through a Twitter feed or
watching the evening news. It's uncanny. It is.
He predicted the Cold War. He predicted the specific
kind of isolation and anxiety we feel in modern
life. He even, and this is the really spooky
part, predicted the rise of a soft kind of tyranny
that looks suspiciously like the algorithm driven,
convenience obsessed world we live in now. He
absolutely did. He saw the seeds of our future
in the soil of the 1830s. We are, of course,
talking about Alexis. to talk, Phil. The French
aristocrat who came to America and wrote basically
the ultimate book on it, Democracy in America.
Exactly. And while he is often cited, you know,
usually by politicians who want to sound smart
or pundits who pull a single quote out of context
to prove some point, the reality of who he was
and what he actually saw is so much more complex
and so much more interesting. so that's our mission
today to unpack how this man who came from a
family that was nearly wiped out by the guillotine
in france became the ultimate explainer of democratic
liberty but not just the good stuff no we aren't
just doing the highlight reel right we're going
to get into the messy stuff too we have to because
the same man who wrote so eloquently about liberty
also held some very dark, often overlooked and
contradictory views on colonialism and race.
OK, so we're looking at his biography, his major
works like Democracy in America, the Old Regime
and the Revolution, and also his travel writings
on places like Algeria and Ireland. It's a massive
stack of sources today. We've got the biography,
the letters, the travel journals. So tone setter
for you, the listener. Imagine a guy looking
at the chaos of Jacksonian America. I mean, the
rough manners, the constant elections, tobacco
spitting, and somehow seeing the future of the
entire world. And importantly, he wasn't just
an observer. He wasn't just, you know, a tourist
taking notes for the fun of it. He was a man
on a mission. He was trying to save France. He
was looking for a way to stop his own country
from making the same bloody mistakes it had made
in the past. OK, let's unpack this. Section one,
the aristocrat who sailed west. And we really
have to start with where he came from because
his family background, it sounds absolutely terrifying.
It was traumatic, to say the least. Alexis de
Tocqueville was born on July 29th, 1805 in Paris
into an old aristocratic Norman family. But to
understand his psyche, his whole mindset, you
have to look at the generation just before him.
He was the great grandson of the statesman Mel
Zerbes. And for those who aren't up on their
French Revolution history, Smith Zerbes, he did
not have a happy ending. No. He was a defender
of King Louis XVI, and for that loyalty, he was
guillotined in 1794. Wow. And it wasn't just
him. Tocqueville's own parents, Irv and Louise,
they were imprisoned during the Terror, the bloodiest,
most paranoid phase of the French Revolution.
They were on the list, scheduled to be executed.
So they were on death row, basically. They were.
They were in prison, watching their friends and
family members being taken away to the guillotine,
day after day, knowing their turn was coming.
Talk about a close call. I mean, how did they
survive? Pure luck. They only escaped the guillotine
because the man in charge, Maximilian Robespierre,
he fell from power in 1794. Ah, okay. Robespierre
was overthrown and executed himself just days
before Tocqueville's parents were scheduled to
die. So they survived, but the trauma just, it
never left them. And that must have completely
shaped Tocqueville's childhood. Completely. He
grew up in a world that felt incredibly fragile.
He heard these stories constantly. There is this
one famous detail that his father's hair turned
pure white overnight in prison from the stress.
White hair. How old was he? He was only 24 years
old at the time. That is an incredibly vivid
image. White hair at 24. Yeah. So when Tocqueville
looks at the people or the mob later in his life,
he's not just thinking about voters or, you know,
demographic statistics. He's thinking about the
force that almost annihilated his entire family.
Precisely. It gave him this profound sense of
the fragility of liberty. He realized that democracy
wasn't just a political system. It was a tidal
wave. It was this force of nature that could
so easily turn into tyranny if it wasn't handled
with extreme care. So he wasn't a Democrat by
nature. Not at all. He was an aristocrat by birth
who was smart enough to realize that aristocracy
was dead and he needed to understand what was
coming next. OK, so fast forward to 1831. He's
a young man, about 25 years old. He's working
as a lawyer, a magistrate. But the political
situation in France is messy again. It's always
messy. The July monarchy has just taken over
and he's not a fan. He felt trapped. He wanted
to get away, to see something new, and maybe
just let the political dust settle back home.
So he and his lifelong friend, Gustave de Beaumont,
they came up with a plan. But they couldn't just
say, hey, we're going on a gap year to find ourselves,
right? They needed a reason. No, no. They needed
an official reason to get a leave of absence
and, more importantly, government approval. So
they pitched a mission to the French government.
They would go to the United States to examine
its prisons and penitentiaries. A prison tour.
That was the cover story. It sounds kind of dull
to us now, but at the time, it was a very legitimate
cover. Prison reform was a huge debate in Europe.
The Enlightenment had changed how people thought
about punishment. It wasn't just about dungeons
and torture anymore. The new idea was about rehabilitation.
And the U .S. was the laboratory for this stuff.
It was. It was experimenting with brand new systems,
and France wanted to know if they should copy
them. So it was the perfect excuse. So off they
went. They landed in 1831. Can we just pause
for a second on that trip? I want to understand
the logistics. This wasn't a quick flight. What
was the crossing like? The crossing was brutal.
They sailed on a ship called the Hav. It took
37 days. 37 days. And they ran into storms that
were so bad, Tocqueville, being the kind of curious
intellectual he was, actually tied himself to
the mast at one point just to watch the waves.
He was sick. He was exhausted. That really sets
the scene. And what about New York when they
finally got there? New York in 1831 wasn't the
metropolis we know. It was a boomtown for sure,
but there were pigs literally roaming the streets.
It was chaotic. But what struck him immediately
was the energy. He wrote home saying, I have
never seen a people so full of life. And on the
prison focus, why prisons? What specifically
were they looking at that was so new? The Americans
had two rival systems that the whole world was
watching. The Auburn system and the Philadelphia
system. The Philadelphia system was total solitary
confinement. 24 -7. You sat in a cell, you had
a Bible, and you worked alone. The idea was penitence.
Silence and isolation would cure you. That sounds
like psychological torture. Oh, it was. It drove
men insane. Tocqueville interviewed prisoners
who were just begging for death or any kind of
human contact. And the other one, the Auburn
system. That was in New York. There, prisoners
worked together during the day in large workshops
and factories, but under a rule of total silence.
So you're working next to hundreds of other people
hammering away, but if you even whisper, you
get whipped. Exactly. Communal work, but absolute
silence. Tocqueville favored the Auburn system,
but only slightly. He was pretty skeptical of
both. He saw that while the bodies were being
disciplined, the souls weren't necessarily being
cured. But this focus on structure, on how institutions
shape human behavior, that's the warm -up act
for democracy in America. Right. And while they
did visit the prisons and they actually wrote
the report, it's called the penitentiary system
in the United States. Yeah. They did so much
more. The itinerary for this trip is just incredible.
They were everywhere. Yeah. They didn't just
hang out in Boston and New York. They traveled
widely and under really difficult conditions.
You went to the East Coast cities, obviously.
Of course. But then they went out to the frontier,
which at that time was Michigan. Which is just
wild to think about. Michigan as the Wild West.
It was. It was heavy wilderness. They had to
hire Native American guides. They were fighting
off swarms of mosquitoes. They met other Native
Americans in the forests of Saginaw. It was a
real adventure. And from there? They took steamboats
down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers all the
way to New Orleans. That steamboat journey must
have been incredible. I mean, the mix of people
on those boats, you'd have... Rich planters,
poor farmers, slaves, immigrants, con men. It
was a perfect microcosm of American society.
And it was dangerous, too. Steamboats blew up
all the time. And after New Orleans. They took
stagecoaches through the muddy, terrible roads
of the South, back toward the East Coast. And
they even made a side trip up to Quebec and Canada.
And the whole time, Tocqueville is just taking
notes. Furiously. Constantly. Extensive notes.
He's interviewing everyone he can. He's talking
to former presidents like John Quincy Adams.
But he's also talking to shopkeepers, lawyers,
farmers, even people in the street. So he returned
to France after nine months. And the result wasn't
just the prison report. No. Beaumont, his friend,
wrote a book called Marie or Slavery in the United
States, which was a novel focused on the racial
caste system. But Tocqueville, Tocqueville wrote
the masterpiece. Democracy in America. Published
in two volumes, the first in 1835, the second
in 1840. And it was an instant classic because
he somehow managed to explain America to Europeans
better than Americans could explain it to themselves.
So let's get into section two here. Let's decode
democracy in America. What was the big aha moment
for him? Why was America so different from Europe?
He saw that Europe was trapped. It was stuck
in this fading but still powerful aristocracy
where your social class determined everything.
But America, America was consumed by what he
called middling values. Middling sounds like
an insult to our ears, you know, like mediocre.
But he didn't necessarily mean it that way, did
he? Not entirely, though he definitely had mixed
feelings about it. What he meant was the middle
class. The ethos of the middle class was everywhere.
And he was especially fascinated by the work
ethic. How so? Well, in Europe, especially among
the upper class, having to work for money was
seen as crass. It was vulgar. You had land. You
had a title. You didn't labor for a living. Right.
It's that old idea that a gentleman doesn't get
his hands dirty. It's like on Downton Abbey where
they look down on the cousin who actually has
a job in the city. Exactly that. But in America,
Tocqueville saw that labor was honorable. Even
the wealthy worked. In fact, the prejudice was
the other way around. If you were idle in America,
you were the outcast. You were viewed with suspicion.
And he traced this whole dynamic back to something
really specific. Inheritance laws. This is one
of those details in the book that sounds so boring,
like legal code stuff, but he argues it's the
key to the entire American character. It is absolutely
fundamental to his argument. In Europe, they
had laws of primogeniture. Primogeniture. It
means the eldest son inherits the entire estate,
the land, the castle, the money. It all stays
intact. This keeps the family wealth concentrated
for centuries and creates a permanent aristocracy
that doesn't need to work. But America had gotten
rid of that. Right. In America, estates were
split among all the children's sons and daughters.
Tocqueville observed that this system broke up
large fortunes within a single generation or
two. So if you have a massive farm and five kids,
suddenly you have five medium farms, and the
next generation you have 25 small farms. Exactly.
It forced every generation to get back to work.
It created this constant churn of wealth. The
rich could become poor, and the poor could in
theory become rich. At the very least, the rich
couldn't just... sit on their inherited laurels.
It creates that hustle culture, that feeling
that you can't stop swimming or you'll sink.
Precisely. And this leads to another one of his
key observations, this middling concept. In France,
if you were born a peasant, you were a peasant.
You knew your place. You weren't stressed about
making it because, well, you couldn't make it.
The system was fixed. But in America, Tocqueville
saw universal anxiety. He called it restlessness.
The restless spirit. I remember that phrase.
He said Americans are grave and almost sad, even
in their pleasures. Wait, sad in their pleasures?
Why would they be sad while having fun? Because
they're always worried they're missing out on
something better. He describes them building
a house, but before the roof is even on, they
sell it to move west for a better opportunity.
They plant a field, but they leave before the
harvest. They're constantly chasing the next
best thing. He predicted FOMO. Fear of missing
out. He literally did. That's a perfect description.
He saw that when everyone is theoretically equal,
when the barriers to success are removed, it
means that if you fail, it's your fault. Oh,
that hits hard. In an aristocracy, if I'm poor,
it's because the system is rigged against me.
In a democracy, if I'm poor, it's because I'm
a loser. Exactly. And that psychological burden
creates a constant low -level hum of anxiety.
He wrote, That is just profound. It's the treadmill
of happiness. Yeah. And it links directly back
to that other core idea, the tension between
equality and liberty. Yes. I think most people
today in democratic societies, we think those
two things are best friends. They go hand in
hand. But Tocqueville said, not so fast. This
is his most famous and maybe his most important.
Tension. He argued that while Americans love
liberty, they are absolutely obsessed with equality.
For them, equality is the dominant passion. He
used a really strong phrase for it, didn't he?
A depraved taste. He did. He warned of depraved
taste for equality. By that, he meant a danger
that the weak will want to drag the strong down
to their level rather than rise up themselves.
The tall poppy syndrome. Exactly. He feared that
people would eventually prefer equality and servitude
to... inequality and freedom wow let's unpack
that he's saying we'd rather everyone be miserable
together as long as we're equal then see someone
else succeed more than us in his darker moments
yes that was his fear but i want to clarify something
here because this often gets misquoted you'll
see memes on the internet saying americans are
so enamored of equality The actual text is more
nuanced. He's analyzing the human heart in democratic
ages, not just Americans. He says this passion
for equality is ardent, insatiable, incessant,
and invincible. Invincible, that's a strong word.
A very strong word. He says people will endure
poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will
not endure aristocracy. Equality is the one thing
they will not give up. This brings us to another
word he basically redefined for the modern world.
Individualism. Yes. Today, when we say individualism,
we usually mean it's a good thing. Being unique,
expressing yourself, being a maverick, you know.
Right. Wearing a crazy hat, doing your own thing,
starting a company in your garage. Exactly. But
for Tocqueville, individualism was a very dangerous
thing. He defined it as a calm and considered
feeling that disposes each citizen to isolate
himself. from the mass of his fellows. So it's
not about being unique. It's about withdrawal.
It is 100 % about withdrawal. It's the citizen
who says, you know what? I'm just going to focus
on my family, my close friends, my business,
and I'm going to leave the greater society to
look after itself. He retreats into his own small
private circle. That sounds, well, it sounds
like most people I know. The whole, I just want
a grill for God's sakes meme. And that's why
Tocqueville is so relevant. He saw this happening
in the 1830s. And he warned that this individualism
dries up the wellspring of public virtue. It
eventually just merges into plain old egoism.
And if everyone withdraws into their private
bubble, who is watching the state? Who is taking
care of the community? Exactly. It creates a
vacuum. And a vacuum that tyranny is more than
happy to fill. So what was the cure? Did he have
a solution or was he just doom scrolling through
the 19th century? He did have a solution. And
it was something he marveled at in America. The
cure was associations. Associations. You mean
like clubs and groups? Exactly. Yeah. He was
just amazed at how Americans formed associations
for everything. Religious groups, temperance
societies, political clubs, commercial groups,
literary circles, volunteer fire departments.
You name it, they had a committee for it. He
has that great quote where he says, Americans
of all ages, all conditions, all dispositions
are constantly forming associations. Yes. He
saw that by working together in these voluntary
groups, Americans overcame that selfish, individualistic
withdrawal. These associations forced them to
pay attention to the wider world and to the needs
of their neighbors. He called it Self -interest
properly understood. Self -interest properly
understood. That's a key phrase. What does that
mean exactly? It means realizing that helping
the community actually helps me in the long run.
It's not pure selfless altruism. It's a kind
of smart selfishness. By all of us chipping in
to build a road, we all get to use the road.
By forming a club, we all get stronger and have
more influence than we would alone. So the Rotary
Club saves democracy. In Tocqueville's view,
yes. Absolutely, because it forces you to interact
with your neighbors and solve problems together
without waiting for the government to come in
and do it for you. It builds social fabric. It
builds trust. Okay, so that's the social state.
But now we have to turn to the dark side. Section
three, the dark side of democracy. Because he
didn't just see happy clubs and busy workers.
He saw new forms of tyranny that were totally
different from the old kings and emperors. This
is where he really puts on his prophet hat. And
he starts with... The tyranny of the majority.
And to be clear, he's not just talking about
the majority winning an election and passing
laws the minority doesn't like. No, it's much
deeper and more insidious than that. He's talking
about thought control. In the old days, under
a king or the Inquisition, they might burn your
books or throw you in a dungeon. But your mind,
your soul, was still free to hate the king. Right.
You could be a martyr for your beliefs. But in
a democracy... And he used this powerful metaphor
of a fence. A formidable fence, he called it.
And what happens if you step outside the fence?
You don't go to jail, right? No. And that's the
brilliance of his observation. You don't face
an inquisition. You aren't tortured. Instead,
you face all kinds of unpleasantness and everyday
persecution. You have to go cancel. It is the
19th century version of getting canceled, 100%.
He says a career in politics is closed to you
forever because you offended the only power that
holds the keys. He says of the dissenter, he
yields, he bends, and finally he completely withdraws
into silence. And this kind of pressure, it promotes
mediocrity. Yes. He believed this culture of
majority rule stifles genius. He thought that
people with superior intellect see that the public
doesn't want to hear hard truths or complex ideas
that challenge the comfortable majority opinion.
So what do they do? They either hide away in
small intellectual circles or they go into business
to make money, leaving politics to the people
who are willing to flatter the majority. That
explains a lot about modern politics, frankly.
Let's look at that specific quote you mentioned
to me earlier because it's so shocking. I know
of no country in which there is so little independence
of mind and real freedom of discussion as in
America. That was a bombshell thing to say about
the land of the free, even then. How did he justify
such a strong statement? He justified it by looking
at the press and public opinion. In France at
the time, you had different factions. You had
royalists, Republicans, Bonapartists. They all
had their own newspapers. They hated each other.
But they argued. There was a clash of ideas.
In America, he saw more of a mass opinion. Once
the majority decided something, say religion
is good or democracy is the best system, it became
taboo to seriously question it. It became a kind
of secular dogma. And this connects to his other
terrifying vision. Soft despotism. I want to
drill down on this because this is the part of
the book that feels like it was written last
week. It's like a horror movie screenplay. It
is a truly chilling vision. He argues that the
despotism of the future wouldn't look like the
Roman emperors. It wouldn't be violent or cruel
in the traditional sense. It would be soft. It
would be mild and paternalistic. Paint the picture
for us. What does soft despotism look like, according
to him? He envisions a future with a multitude
of men, all equal and alike. constantly circling
around in pursuit of petty and paltry pleasures.
They are focused entirely on themselves, their
families, and their immediate material comfort.
And what's above them? Above them stands an immense
protective power, the state. But it's not a mean,
oppressive state. It's a state that wants to
keep them happy. It provides for their security.
It supplies their necessities. It facilitates
their pleasures. It directs their industries.
It sounds like a parent, the helicopter parent.
That is the exact metaphor he uses. He says the
state becomes like a parent, but with one terrible
difference. A parent prepares a child for adulthood.
This power, he says, seeks, on the contrary,
to keep them in perpetual childhood. Yes. It
doesn't break their will. It softens it. It bends
it. It guides it. It rarely forces men to act,
but it constantly opposes their acting. It doesn't
tyrannize, but it compresses. enervates, extinguishes,
and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced
to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious
animals of which the government is the shepherd.
That is just terrifyingly accurate to how we
discuss the welfare state or even just consumerist
apathy today, the idea of swapping real freedom
for comfort and security. It's the grand trade
-off. We ask the government to solve every problem,
to smooth every rough edge of life. And in exchange,
we give up our agency, our autonomy. We stop
being citizens and we start being clients or
dependents. And he saw this possibility in the
1830s when the federal government was absolutely
tiny. It had, what, a few thousand employees?
That's the genius of his extrapolation. He saw
the internal logic of equality and where it could
lead if it was left unchecked. He saw that if
everyone is equal. and therefore individually
weak, they will naturally look to the one big
power, the state, to protect them and provide
for them. Speaking of predictions, let's move
to section four, the profit of geopolitics and
race. Because if soft despotism wasn't enough,
he also basically predicted the Cold War. This
is one of those passages that just makes you
check the publication date to make sure it's
real. It's at the very end of the first volume
of Democracy in America. He looks at the global
map of his time. And he sees two giant players
emerging from the pack. He does. He says there
are now two great nations in the world, which,
starting from different points, seem to be advancing
toward the same goal. The Russians and the Anglo
-Americans. And he contrasts their methods perfectly.
It's incredible. He says the American struggles
against the obstacles of nature. The adversaries
of the Russian are men. The American combats
the wilderness and barbarism. The Russian civilization
with all its arms. The American relies on personal
interest and allows the force and reason of individuals
to act. The Russian concentrates all the power
of society in one man. One has liberty for its
principal needs of action. The other servitude.
And then the kicker, the final line. Their starting
point is different and their courses are not
the same. Yet each of them seems called by some
secret design of providence one day to hold in
its hands the destinies of half the world. Written
in 1835, over 100 years before the Cold War really
kicked off. That is just spooky. It's geopolitical
foresight of the absolute highest order. He understood
that mass, scale and resources would define the
future and that the old fragmented powers of
Europe like France and Britain were on their
way out. But he also looked inward at the racial
dynamics inside America. And this is where his
picture gets very, very bleak. He didn't buy
into the optimistic idea that everything would
just work itself out. Not at all. He devoted
a massive chapter, the longest in the entire
book, to the three races in America, the white,
the Negro and the Indian. And he saw nothing
but inevitable conflict. Let's start with his
view on slavery and black Americans. He hated
slavery, right? He was an abolitionist. He was
a staunch abolitionist. He believed slavery was
a profound evil, not just for the enslaved, but
also for the enslaver. But he was incredibly
pessimistic about what would happen after slavery
ended. And he noticed something really weird,
something counterintuitive about prejudice in
the North versus the South. He did. He wrote
that racial prejudice was actually stronger in
the northern states that had abolished slavery
than in the southern states where it still existed.
How did he explain that? That seems completely
backwards. His logic was that in the South...
slavery was a legal institution it was a fixed
hierarchy everyone knew their place in the north
because the law made everyone theoretically equal
the white population he observed had to enforce
the separation socially with even more ferocity
to maintain their dominance he said Nowhere is
prejudice so intolerant as in those states where
servitude has never been known. He believed they
were trapped. Completely trapped. He believed
the black population could never fully assimilate
because of this deep -seated white prejudice.
And he also dismissed the idea of sending everyone
back to Africa, the Liberia colonization project,
as a logistical fantasy. The black population
was growing too fast. What did he think would
happen? He feared a race war was almost inevitable.
And what about Native Americans? Well... He was
witnessing the Indian removal period firsthand,
the Trail of Tears era. He was horrified by the
hypocrisy and the cruelty of it. He criticized
the extermination that was happening under the
guise of legal treaties. But he also had this
theory about why their fate was sealed. He viewed
it through this tragic lens of civilization versus
pride. He believed that the Native Americans
were too proud to assimilate. They refused to
adopt the ways of the white man because they
valued their own freedom and their own culture
too much. Whereas he felt black people were being
actively prevented from assimilating, even if
they wanted to. Exactly. He wrote, the Negro
would like to mix with the European and cannot.
The Indian might, to some extent, succeed, but
he scorns to attempt it. So ultimately, he predicted
the extinction of the Native American tribes
as independent nations. He saw the juggernaut
of American expansion and knew nothing would
be allowed to stand in its way. It's heavy stuff.
And it really shows that he wasn't just a cheerleader
for democracy. He saw the bodies buried underneath
the foundation of the whole project. He did.
But this brings us to the most uncomfortable
part of our deep dive. Section 5. The other talk
film. Because while he was criticizing American
treatment of Native Americans, when it came to
French colonialism, Tocqueville sounds like a
very, very different person. Yeah, this is the
Algeria paradox. I think a lot of people who
love Tocqueville, they conveniently forget this
part or just gloss over it. It is often glossed
over, but we have to confront it. Tocqueville
was a major supporter and a key parliamentary
voice on the French colonization of Algeria.
So some context. France had invaded Algeria in
1830 and Tocqueville visited. Twice, right? In
1841 and 1846. Yes. And initially, very early
in his career, he had this sort of idealistic
hope that the French and Arab races could mix,
that they could amalgamate. But after visiting,
seeing it on the ground, he did a complete 180.
He decided assimilation was impossible. And his
conclusion wasn't let's leave. It was let's dominate.
He called for a dual program, domination and
colonization. He was critical of the French military
government for being chaotic and corrupt in its
treatment of French colonists, but he fully supported
the total subjugation of the Arab population.
There are some quotes here that are just really
hard to reconcile with the author of Democracy
in America. He talks about scorched earth tactics.
He does. He wrote in a report to Parliament that
burning harvests, emptying silos, and seizing
unarmed civilians, women and children, were,
and this is his phrase, unfortunate necessities.
Unfortunate necessities. That sounds like a modern
military euphemism for a war crime. He compared
it to European siege warfare. He argued that
if you are going to wage war, you have to wage
it effectively. He wrote, I have often heard
men in France whom I respect, but with whom I
do not agree, find it wrong to burn harvests
and empty silos. For my part, I think that these
are unfortunate necessities. Why? Why did the
man who wrote so beautifully about liberty support
this? It feels like a massive, glaring contradiction.
It is, but you have to understand the context
of 1840s France. The country felt humiliated.
They had lost the Napoleonic Wars. They saw themselves
as a second -rate power compared to Great Britain,
which was building a global empire. Right. Britannia
rules the waves. Exactly. And Tocqueville, for
all his liberalism, was an aristocrat who believed
in grandeur, national greatness. He believed
a nation needed a great enterprise to be healthy.
If a nation just focuses on making money, those
petty pleasures again, he thought it rots from
the inside out. So he saw war and colonization
as a kind of vitamin shot for the national soul.
In a way, yes. He thought the struggle of colonization
would revitalize the French spirit. which he
felt was becoming soft and materialistic. He
wrote, That is a very dangerous logic. It is,
and it gets worse. He even advocated for formal
segregation. He proposed two distinct legal systems,
one for the European colonists, with all the
rights of Frenchmen, and a separate, much harsher
one for the native Arabs. It was a precursor
to an apartheid -like structure. Was there any
nuance at all, or did he just want to crush everyone?
There was some nuance. For instance, he opposed
the French invasion of Kabylia, the mountainous
Berber region. He kind of admired the Kabyles.
He saw them as noble savages in the old Rousseau
sense. And he did warn, prophetically again,
that if France treated the local populations
too poorly for too long, colonization would end
in a bloodbath. Which, history spoiler alert,
is exactly what happened in the 20th century
with the Algerian War of Independence. Exactly.
It was a horrific bloodbath. Tocqueville saw
the danger, but he thought the domination was
a risk worth taking for the sake of France's
glory. It is the great stain on his liberal legacy.
Before we get to the end of his life, we should
touch briefly on his travels to England and Ireland,
because he went there too, and he had some fascinating
observations about aristocracy that are relevant
here. He did. He went to England in 1833 and
Ireland in 1835, and he was obsessed with the
difference between the French word gentilhomme
and the English word gentleman. I thought they
basically meant the same thing. Not to Tocqueville.
And this distinction for him explained why England
had been stable while France had been so chaotic.
In France, gentilhomme meant noble by birth.
You couldn't become one. You had to be born one.
It was a closed, rigid caste. Right. You either
have the blood or you don't. But in England,
he saw that the word gentleman could be applied
to any well -educated, well -mannered man, regardless
of his birth. So the British aristocracy was
more open, more permeable. Exactly. Which is
why he thought England avoided a violent, bloody
revolution like France's. The elite was more
flexible. If you made a fortune in trade and
sent your son to the right schools, he could
become part of the club. The aristocracy wasn't
a closed fortress. It was a club with a very
high entry fee. But you could buy your way in.
And Ireland. Ireland was a horror show for him,
a total nightmare. He described it as having
all the evils of an aristocracy and none of its
advantages. Ouch. He saw extreme grinding poverty
right next to the mansions of the Anglo -Irish
landlords. The poor man at his gate, he wrote.
But he noticed something really interesting about
the Catholic clergy there. In France, the church
was traditionally allied with the king and the
rich. But in Ireland, because of British oppression,
the Catholic priests were the only friends, the
only leaders. of the poor Irish population. So
that broke his simple model of religion always
being a conservative force. Right. It showed
him that religion could be a force for liberty
and for the people, depending on the political
context. He wrote about the unbelievable unity
between the Irish clergy and the Catholic population.
So let's move to the final act, Section 6, The
Politician and the End. Because Tocqueville didn't
just write books from his study. He tried to
get into the arena. He tried to be a politician.
How did that go? He was. Respectable, but perhaps
too intellectual for the rough and tumble of
daily politics. He served in the Chamber of Deputies
for years, from 1839 to 1851. But he wasn't a
great orator. He had a quiet voice. He was often
sick. He was more of a thinker than a leader
of men. But he was there for the big one, the
1848 revolution. Which he totally foresaw. Just
a few months before it happened, he gave a famous
speech in the chamber saying, We are sleeping
on a volcano. Can you not feel the wind of revolution
in the air? He told his colleagues that the mores
of the common people were changing, that they
were losing all respect for their rulers. And
they probably rolled their eyes and ignored him.
They did. And then, of course, the volcano erupted.
The revolution happened. The king was overthrown.
And whose side was he on in that chaos? He sided
with the party of order. He was absolutely terrified
of the socialists. He feared the mob again. You
can see that childhood trauma coming right back
to the surface. He supported the military suppression
of the June Days Uprising, which was a violent
clash between Parisian workers and the new Republican
government. He even advocated for the regularization
of the state of siege. That sounds pretty authoritarian
for a lover of liberty. It was. But in his mind,
he was prioritizing order because he believed
that without order, there could be no liberty
at all. He even became minister of foreign affairs
for a brief stint in 1849 under the new Second
Republic. For what, about five months? Yeah,
a very short time. It was a chaotic period. But
then came the man who would end his political
career for good. Louis Napoleon, the nephew of
the famous Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon III.
Tocqueville despised him. He saw him as a charlatan,
a wannabe despot who was using the name of his
famous uncle to seize power. And when Louis Napoleon
staged his coup d 'etat in 1851 to make himself
emperor, Tokyo stood in opposition. And he was
arrested. He was. He gathered with a group of
other deputies to resist the coup, to declare
it high treason. But they were all rounded up
by the military. He was detained at the fortress
of Vincennes for a few days and then released.
But that was it for him. He quit politics for
good. He refused to serve a usurper. So he goes
home to his castle. He literally had a castle,
the Chateau de Tocqueville in Normandy. And he
writes one last masterpiece. The Old Regime and
the Revolution. Published in 1856. And it totally
changed how history was understood. What was
the big thesis? Because it sounds like a dry
history book, but you're saying it's really a
political argument. It's a masterpiece of political
sociology. He asked a simple but brilliant question.
Why did the revolution happen in France, of all
places, and not somewhere else where the oppression
was even worse? And his answer wasn't the simple
because the king was so bad. No. In fact, he
argued the opposite. The revolution happened
precisely where things were getting better. Wait,
what? That's the revolution of rising expectations
theory. Yes, he's one of its originators. He
pointed out that the French peasantry in the
late 18th century was actually better off than
the German or Russian peasantry. They owned land.
They had more personal freedom. So why revolt?
If things are getting better, why burn it all
down? Because once you have a little bit of freedom,
the remaining oppression becomes absolutely unbearable.
If you were... totally crushed. You can't even
imagine a different life. But if you are halfway
free, the chains you still wear feel heavier
than ever. That is a psychological insight that
explains so many modern movements. And this other
big point was that the revolutionaries, for all
their talk of liberty, hated the king, but they
loved the king's power. They didn't want to destroy
the centralized state. They wanted to take it
over. And they ended up making it even stronger
and more absolute than the monarchy ever was.
So the path from monarchy to democracy to tyranny
was paved by centralization. Exactly. For him,
Napoleon wasn't the opposite of the revolution.
He was its logical conclusion. The perfect democratic
despot. Everyone is equal under one all -powerful
ruler. And sadly, that was his last big intellectual
act. Yes. He had suffered from tuberculosis for
a long time. It finally caught up with him. He
died on April 16, 1859, in Cannes, on the French
Riviera. He was only 53 years old. We should
mention his wife, Mary Motley, before we wrap
up his life. We must. Their relationship is really
quite touching. She was English, she was middle
class, and she was a Protestant, though she did
convert to Catholicism for him. And his aristocratic
French family must have just hated that. Oh,
they did. She wasn't an aristocrat. She wasn't
rich. She was too English. But Tocqueville adored
her. They were married for 23 years, and he called
her his only true friend. It shows that for all
his grand theories about society, he was also
a man who valued that deep personal connection.
And they never had any children, which some biographers
think perhaps allowed him to focus so intensely
on his work, on his intellectual legacy. So let's
bring this all home. What does this all mean?
We've looked at the aristocrat, the traveler,
the prophet, the colonialist. What's the final
picture? I think we see a man of profound contradictions,
a lover of liberty who supported colonial domination,
an aristocrat by birth who accepted that democracy
was the inevitable future, even if he didn't
entirely like the taste of it. He seems like
someone who is desperately trying to build guardrails
for a car that was already speeding down the
highway. That is a perfect analogy. He knew he
couldn't stop the car democracy, but he wanted
to teach us how to drive it so that we didn't
crash into the wall of tyranny. And his warnings,
his warnings about the fence around thought and
the soft sleep of comfort, they really stick
with me. It just feels like he's describing the
algorithm -driven, convenience -obsessed world
we're living in right now. It really, really
does. He feared that we would willingly trade
our freedom for a quiet, comfortable life. He
feared we would become those timid animals. Which
brings us to a final thought. We talked about
his cure for all this. Associations. Meeting
people. Solving problems together. Face to face.
In the real world. Let's give the listener a
practical takeaway here. What does an association
look like in 2026? It's not just a formal nonprofit.
No, not at all. It's any group where you have
to actually negotiate and cooperate with other
human beings. It could be a pickup basketball
league, a community garden, a protest group,
a book club, a church choir. And why is that
negotiation part so important? Because democracy
is annoying. And other people are annoying. They
have different opinions. They want to do things
differently than you do. When you're in a real
association, you have to learn to compromise.
You have to listen. You have to persuade. You
can't just block them or mute them or downvote
them. It's like a gym for your citizenship muscles.
That's a perfect metaphor. If you don't go to
the gym, your muscles atrophy. If you don't participate
in associations, your citizen muscles atrophy.
You forget how to be a free person. among other
free people. And then you just want the shepherd,
the government, to come in and take care of everything
for you. Exactly. So here's the final thought.
In a world where we are increasingly isolated
behind our screens, where so -called social media
is actually making us more withdrawn, that individualism
he warned about, have we locked the one tool
he said could save us from ourselves? It is the
fundamental question of our time. Tocqueville
would say that clicking like is not an association.
Arguing in a comment section is not an association.
You have to get out of the house. You have to
engage with the messy, difficult, wonderful reality
of other people. That is the only way to keep
liberty alive. A challenge from 1835 to the future?
Get out of the house. Indeed. Alexis de Tocqueville,
the time traveler, thank you for bringing him
to life for us today. It was my pleasure. And
thank you for listening to this deep dive. It's
been a fascinating journey. We'll see you next
time.