The Future of Our Republic: Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America

One of my most-prized possession is a century-old copy of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. This book was first published in 1835, following his tour of early 19^th-century America; mine is copyright 1900. Because he was a Frenchman, whose country was also struggling at that time with a fledgling democracy, he was both interested and objective in his analysis of the state of our government. The reason this book holds such reverence, even today, is that it is a completely honest assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of modern democracy and because many of its conclusions have since been proven to be amazingly accurate.

At the time, de Tocqueville was interested in examining the reasons for, what, in his view, was the success of the American "experiment". Through the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, it is not a democracy, but a representative republic. This was to avoid some of the major pitfalls of true democracy. In his assessment, he identified three ways that democracy was subject to failure in its noble goals.

One of these was the tendency to dissolve into a form of "mob rule", which was simply a different type of tyranny. The unchecked majority will tend to use its political strength to trample on the rights of minorities. The election of representatives helps to distance decision-making from the people; we have already done away with the indirect election of Senators and now some talk of eliminating the Electoral College. The Bill of Rights was ratified to provide protections for individuals from the will of the majority; since then, other minority rights issues have led to civil war, to protests and associated violence and to nearly constant political debates to this day.