and the river, which had nearly broken its banks, sinks to its usual level; but who can refrain from astonishment that such a storm should have arisen?” Your correspondent, who is also a foreigner, has covered three presidential elections for The Economist. This remains the best description of what they are like. It also captures Tocqueville’s fundamental view about American democracy: that the chaos on the surface of public life disguises a profound stability beneath. Like other visitors from godless Europe, Tocqueville was struck by how religious the country was. “From time to time strange sects arise which endeavour to strike out extraordinary paths to happiness,” he writes. “Religious insanity is very common in the United States.” Later sociologists would argue that the greater vitality of religion in America could be explained by competitive pressure. There was no religious monopoly in the competition for souls, so any church that stopped hustling would decline. That was one more manifestation of Americans’ ubiquitous, manic energy. “In the United States,” Toqueville writes, “a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on.” Rather than enjoy what they had, Americans were “restless in the midst of abundance”. You could even see it in how they holidayed. If an American finds himself with a few days off at the end of a year of hard work, “his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel 1,500 miles in a few days to shake off his unhappiness.” Recall that this was written by someone who had never seen an airport just before Thanksgiving. Some of this restless energy was directed towards politics. But mostly it was spent on commerce and the acquisition of stuff. Yet rather than sneer at these qualities—the love of commerce, the religious fanaticism, the restlessness—as other snooty travellers have done before and since, Tocqueville thought that Americans’ strange passions were part of what made their democracy work. Religion provided a moral anchor, which was even more necessary in a society that changed so fast. A focus on business taught Americans patience, flexibility and a willingness to compromise, all qualities which were defences against the kind of revolution France had suffered (and which had almost separated Tocqueville père’s et mère’s heads from their shoulders with a steel blade).
One of the best passages of the book describes the contrast between the two banks of the Ohio river. On one side was a slave state (Kentucky) while the other side was free (Ohio). In Kentucky, society seemed to be asleep. Ohio, across the water, was humming. On one bank work meant slavery, on the other it meant prosperity and improvement: “on the one side it is degraded; on the other side it is honoured.” Tocqueville was a racial pessimist: he thought black and white Americans would never live alongside each other in conditions of real equality. Such snippets are reason enough to read “Democracy in America” at any time. But the book has extra resonance now because of the echoes of the 1830s in the Trump era. Andrew Jackson was president when Tocqueville was in America, and they met in the White House. The visitor was unimpressed. Jackson was “a man of violent temper and very moderate talents; nothing in his whole career ever proved him qualified to govern a free people; and, indeed, the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union has always opposed him.” Donald Trump has had similar things said about him by emissaries of foreign governments, though they are usually too afraid of retribution to print them. Mr Trump’s first election sparked a mini boom in Jackson studies, after he moved a portrait of the seventh president into the Oval Office. Jackson
governed as a populist. His supporters were frontiersmen, farmers and slaveholders. Some of them broke into the White House after his first inauguration and smashed the place up. They were persuaded to leave only by a large quantity of free booze on the lawn outside. Much like Mr Trump, Jackson still horrifies the enlightened classes: he was vicious towards Native Americans and was himself both a slave owner and a defender of slavery. For the current president, putting Jackson’s portrait by his desk was a sign that in his America nobody has to apologise for the past, apart from people who apologise for the past. Tocqueville thought Jackson was ghastly. But he was struck that he could address even the head of state as plain Mr Jackson (that has changed). This part of Jacksonian populism he approved of. Tocqueville himself was a count who did not like his title and did not use it. American informality was significant, as important as the constitution or the courts for what it revealed about democratic society. For when Tocqueville writes about democracy, he does not only have in mind the business of choosing lawmakers–the yard signs, attack ads and fundraising emails we think of today. He means democracy as a way of relating to one another. America, he reckoned, was a social experiment as much as a political one. Pre-revolutionary France had been a society of formal gradations: in addition to their titles, aristocrats wore different clothes, ate different food, had different leisure pursuits, were even treated differently by the law. In America all this was swept away, replaced by “equality of conditions”. That did not mean, as socialists would later dream, that everyone was equally rich. It meant that nobody was deemed superior. Signs of this equality were everywhere. Even the way parents and children spoke to one another was different from Europe. Sons were less fearful of their fathers, and the fathers did not behave like oracles or dictators. When children reached maturity, their independence was an “incontestable right”. Each generation started afresh, and inheritance laws prevented the accrual of vast fortunes. The goal of an aristocrat was to keep their children’s children from ever having to work. An American parent’s job, by contrast, was to bring their children to a point where they could feed and clothe themselves, then let go. Young American women were freer than European ones. They
could travel without chaperones; they could be “consummate flirts” before marriage. That was equality, too. Tocqueville’s book is not all boosterish. Running through it is a very French taste for paradox. Everything contains its opposite. Democracy, like any other system, could undo itself. Because he was such an enthusiast for America, and for self-government, his warnings carry more weight. John Sturart Mill, the greatest British liberal of the era, raved about “Democracy in America”. He called it “the first philosophical book ever written on democracy”. But he thought Tocqueville too pessimistic on some points. Mill imagined that in a democracy, the wisest men would lead society. Tocqueville thought that demo-cracy did not work like that. People like Jackson would lead, because in a democracy popular opinion is sovereign, and because democracies tended towards mediocrity in government. The most talented people would be too occupied with commerce to concern themselves with politics. As for the idea that public opinion would be formed by brilliant writers and thinkers, the inverse was more likely. America’s equivalent of Mill would follow public opinion, not lead it. In America, he wrote, “the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them.” That is no longer a good description of how America argues. Hardly any question seems settled. But it does capture how social media work, with their separate worlds of information within which people do not just silence debate, they do not even ask what is worth debating. He also feared democratic unravelling. Usually so fluent, Tocqueville struggled to define what to call this. Words like “tyranny” and “despotism” belonged to a different age. He could not think of a term, so instead he described it. Democratic oppression, he wrote, would be “unlike anything that ever before existed in the world”. An equal, democratic society made up of people pursuing their own happiness could become so atomised that citizens would give up on politics, withdraw, leave it to someone else. Above these people would stand “an immense and tutelary power, which
takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate”. This power would seek to keep people “in perpetual childhood”. After this one trip, Tocqueville never returned to America. He had seen enough to explain to people back home that he had seen the future. Like it or not, there was no going back to how things used to be. He was right about that as well. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/11/tik-tocqueville
The Knicks represent New York—and capitalism —at its best That is why New Yorkers love them June 11th 2026 “Even as the rich world enjoys low unemployment, record real household incomes and soaring stockmarkets, people have rarely been so gloomy.” So wrote The Economist in last week’s briefing on Gen-Z socialism. That is true, of course. Yet to append a caveat: capitalism has recently been hosting a festival of inequality upon the most important staging ground of the new American socialism, New York City, and it is hard to imagine the city brimming with more excitement and even joy. With the cheapest seats going for thousands of dollars and the most expensive for well over $100,000, almost everyone in New York has had no hope of joining the elite of Wall Street and Hollywood at Madison Square Garden to watch in person