11/07/00 10:55 a.m.
Tocqueville on Campaign 2000
It’s the same country, whatever they say.

By Michael Ledeen, author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership

ice President Gore and his friends on the editorial board of the New York Times have been beating up on Gov. Bush for his criticism of big government, and the Times insists that Bush is "out of synch" with the American people. If they've got it right (which I doubt), then Alexis de Tocqueville's nightmare vision for the end of American democracy is on the verge of fulfillment.

Tocqueville famously marveled at our amazing character, which balances intense commitments to opposite convictions. We are at once religious and secular, interventionist and isolationist, individualist (he invented the word to describe us) and collectivist. It is this last internal conflict that is most at stake in Tuesday's vote.

Tocqueville feared that, given a choice between personal enrichment and devotion to freedom, Americans might well choose wealth, and ignore their political and social obligations. If that happened, he warned, it would open the door to ambitious leaders who would impose an unprecedented form of tyranny: not the sort of ruthless totalitarianism we know so well from Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, but a relentlessly meddling government that ties us down, as the Lilliputians did to Gulliver, in a suffocating network of regulations and rules:

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Tocqueville's nightmare is Al Gore's dream. Gore offers us a Faustian deal: I'll make you rich and comfortable, he says, and all you have to do in return is let me make your basic decisions. If we go for that deal, we will lose our unique dynamism. In Tocqueville's great phrase, we will…unwind.

Americans are not relaxed, comfortable, easy-going people. We are in constant stress, because we still believe in solving our problems by ourselves whenever we can. We do not view government as an implacable enemy, but our visceral instincts — our uniquely healthy visceral instincts, the instincts that have kept freedom alive here when it was crushed elsewhere in the West, the instincts that drove us to reestablish freedom in countries where it had been crushed by fascist or communist tyrants — are distrustful of leaders, and fearful of big government. Gore and his ideological allies at the Times believe our national character has changed, and that we are ready for the kind of enervating welfare state that has so gutted the energies of the Europeans, and they, the philosophes of this terrible counter-revolution, welcome the change. They think that they will tie down all those little strings that will make us orderly and submissive.

I think they're wrong. I think our national character is basically unchanged since 1831, when Tocqueville first set eyes on us. I don't think we're ready for that Faustian deal. But at this potentially decisive juncture in our history, we would do well to remind ourselves that the real stakes in this election are very high indeed, and to reread the warning of the Frenchman who turned out to be our national psychoanalyst.