This year, like every year, the best and brightest young conservatives will win prestigious fellowships, gather in seminars, and read Alexander de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The classic work has long been a favorite of the American Right for its description of a decentralized, pluralist civil society animated by the “spirit of association,” a patchwork of church meetings and debating societies that trained ordinary citizens in the art of democracy.
That vision of America has been on life support for decades. Today, young conservatives looking for a more relevant lesson would do better to pick up The Old Regime, Tocqueville’s lesser-known book on the causes of the French Revolution. There, Tocqueville sought to explain why France’s middle class violently rebelled against its aristocratic ruling elite. His thesis was elegant and eternal: The French elite fell because it abandoned its duties while hoarding its privileges. Nobles had always enjoyed “rights that weighed heavily on the commoner,” but they also “kept order, administered justice, saw to the execution of the laws, came to the rescue of the oppressed, and watched over the interests of all.” When they decided instead to leave their peasants and decamp to enclaves of urban luxury, “the more uncalled-for did their privileges appear,” and the result was a paroxysm of violence.
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