Conservatives are accustomed to books, from The Road to Serfdom in 1944 to Liberal Fascism in 2008, warning of the affinities between the leftist project and hard despotism. Now comes a valuable new book from Paul Rahe, a Hillsdale College historian, warning of the dangers of soft despotism.

Where hard despotism brutalizes, soft despotism infantilizes. Hard despotism conquers the social spaces where citizens live their lives and exercise their freedoms. Soft despotism slowly and imperceptibly fills the vacuum formed when citizens voluntarily abandon those spaces.

Rahe directs our attention to modern Western European social democracies to understand the encroachments of soft despotism, and to France to see its culmination. His discussion of the “French disease” makes clear that Frenchmen’s virtuosity at surrendering to invaders and terrorists is the result of a few centuries of practice at surrendering their destinies and liberties to bureaucracies. Such entities constitute, in Tocqueville’s words, “an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring [the people’s] enjoyment and watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle.”

In a thesis resembling that of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by Daniel Bell, Rahe argues that the effects of living in a democracy render the continued survival of democracy increasingly doubtful. Democracy drifts as its citizens gradually embrace habits and dispositions that treat freedom as a burden, and reduce self-government to a hollow ritual in which wards choose between interchangeable sets of wardens.

To grasp the dangers confronting America tomorrow and today, we need to understand the past interplay between the distinctive features of our social condition and the inherent tendencies of democracy. America “should not gloat or be smug,” says Rahe, for we, too, have “contracted the French disease,” which now “advances at a quickening pace.”

Fittingly, Rahe turns to French political philosophers for guidance. To understand the perils posed by the cultural contradictions of democracy we need to understand Tocqueville. (On this point Rahe’s argument aligns with the assertion of Harvey Mansfield and the late Delba Winthrop that Democracy in America is “the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.”) And to understand Tocqueville we need to understand Rousseau and Montesquieu, since Tocqueville was “Rousseau’s secret admirer” and “Montesquieu’s heir.”

Rahe’s peers, professors of intellectual history and political philosophy, will find the meticulous scholarship and deep erudition he brings to connecting the three French philosophers impressive and provocative. To summarize Soft Despotism’s subtle, thorough argument too briefly to do it justice: Montesquieu contended in the early 18th century that the “Achilles heel” of the modern commercial republic was its pervasive sense of restlessness and anxiety, culminating in what Leo Strauss called “the joyless quest for joy.” Rousseau, writing in the middle of the 18th century, was even more pessimistic, presenting “citizenship on the ancient model as the only plausible remedy” for modern restiveness, according to Rahe, but giving little reason to expect the convenient reappearance of that deus ex machina before the curtain comes down. Tocqueville, finally, combined the most detailed exposition of democracy’s self-extinguishing tendencies with the qualified hope that America’s unique history and social conditions offered the most promising check against those tendencies, one that might even be sufficient to save democracy from itself indefinitely.

The portion of the book most accessible and interesting to the lay reader will be the final chapters, tracing the practical consequences of democracy’s contradictions. There, Rahe argues that all the components of “American exceptionalism” hailed by Tocqueville are weakening, and urges us to fortify them. It is “one thing to diagnose,” says Rahe of Rousseau, “and another to cure.”

Of course, the vast majority of books written about politics offer diagnoses more compelling than their cures. Soft Despotism is no exception to this rule, but the reasons its prescriptions underwhelm are as important and interesting as the book’s argument itself.

Soft Despotism’s final page exhorts Americans to recapture the “Don’t Tread on Me” spirit: honor, proud self-reliance, and the vigorous, jealous defense of liberty. Tocqueville found ample evidence of these qualities in the America he visited in 1831, and wrote about them admiringly. Rahe, too, cherishes the American traits that push back against the gravitational pull toward soft despotism, and laments that they are far less evident today than they were 178 years ago. Their reinvigoration will require according “central importance” to such commitments as “chastity and fidelity, marriage and family,” “religious faith,” “local and state autonomy,” the “right to life,” the “right to retain that which one has earned,” and, above all, “the profound dignity and crucial importance of citizenship in the broadest sense.”

It is an agenda that tells modern conservatives nothing they will be unhappy to hear, but less than they need to know. To be sure, says Rahe, we cannot re-create “the small-town America that so impressed Tocqueville.” At the same time, he warns Americans that it is imperative to “be what we once were,” lest we “settle for a gradual, gentle descent into servitude.”

The hard question remains: What does it mean, in theory and practice, to be what we once were, after it has become impossible to live as we once lived? It is here that Rahe’s cure comes up short, and where the reader begins to worry that an effort to wrest a fighting faith from Democracy in America is fundamentally misbegotten. Tocqueville was not Tom Paine; even less was he le premier dittohead.

He was, rather, an exemplar of philosophical discernment and resignation. For Tocqueville, playing the hand that history deals us as best we can is our highest duty. Folded within it is the obligation not to kid ourselves about our latitude for action, or the scope of the successes we can hope for. To keep social and political conditions from getting worse will often be a signal achievement. The more quotidian victories will see conditions get worse slowly rather than rapidly. Effecting any significant, durable reversal of democracy’s drift is an item rarely found on history’s menu.

Consider Rahe’s unhappy but indisputable observation that “the sexual division of labor, so admired by Tocqueville, has gone by the boards.” That division was based on a belief Tocqueville considered more prevalent among Americans than Europeans in 1831, but one largely taken for granted in every time and place until our own lifetimes. It was the belief, in Tocqueville’s words, that “nature had established a very great difference between the physical and moral constitution of man and that of woman” with the clear intent “to give their differing faculties a diverse employment.” Americans embraced that belief, and gave it social force, through “an inexorable public opinion that carefully restrains woman within the circle of her domestic interests and duties and that prohibits her from departing from it.”

Does Rahe’s summons “to be what we once were” include that? If so, the problem is not that a resolution to revive those attitudes would be shouted down by the National Organization for Women, but that it would have little chance of securing a majority of Conservative Political Action Committee delegates.

Tocqueville saw how families formed by men who were husbands, fathers, and providers, and women who were wives, mothers, and homemakers, constituted a haven from the joyless pursuit of joy, and a bulwark against the democratic drift toward servitude. But careful readers of Democracy in America cannot be surprised that, in a democratic age, the relentless, pervasive spirit of equality ultimately enveloped and transformed that haven. For perhaps 10 or 15 years after Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique appeared in 1963, there were conservatives trying to hold the line. Many insisted that girls should still regard motherhood and “domestic interests and duties” as the most natural, satisfying, and admirable path for their lives, and all the alternatives that disdained or qualified the commitment to home and family as profoundly dubious.

As long ago as 1987, however, Allan Bloom could describe that battle in The Closing of the American Mind as a question settled so decisively as to make it hard to believe it had ever been contested: “Men and women are now used to living in exactly the same way and studying the same things and having the same career expectations. No man would think of ridiculing a female premed or prelaw student, or believe that these fields are not proper for women, or assert that a woman should put family before career.” Last year, the only people who asked whether Gov. Sarah Palin’s political career impinged on her duties to her husband and children were liberals trying to bait family-values conservatives. No one took the bait because no one on the right wants to fight about all that anymore.

The fact that the democratization of domestic life has proven irresistible has not rendered it feasible, of course. Predictably, democracy turns out to be ludicrously maladapted to governing a polity of two. After every precinct has reported, the final vote tally is always either 2–0 or 1–1. Matrimonial democracy, in other words, is peerless at settling faux disputes and useless at resolving real ones.

Bloom examined these difficulties, but concluded equivocally: “I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them.” Rahe, by contrast, clearly believes the old family arrangements were good, lamenting how “we have forgotten” that “strong, stable families” are vital to limiting the ends government may pursue and the means it may employ. The clear implication is that, yes, we should go back to the old family arrangements if we could, but Rahe has little to say about how we could.

Similarly, Rahe joins Tocqueville in praising Americans for their participation in local government and civic associations, which gave them a sense of stewardship and confidence about managing the public affairs that affected them most directly. The revival of the old civic arrangements is, however, as improbable as the revival of the old family arrangements. The level of civic engagement that impressed Tocqueville in 1831 would take up too many evenings for most Americans in 2009. With modern transportation and prosperity making geographic mobility possible, and career ambitions making it necessary, growing numbers of Americans feel a contingent rather than a custodial relationship to their places of residence.

Even for those who stay put, and take their local duties seriously, the pressure to outsource civic responsibilities is profound. In most of America, volunteer fire companies are a fading memory. Civic-minded townsmen used to run from their shops and offices at the sound of an alarm to assist endangered fellow-citizens. To use Rahe’s terms about civic engagement generally, the fire companies helped their members gain “a sense of their own strength and significance,” learn “how to act in concert,” and “band together for the purpose of achieving ends that they could not have accomplished on their own.”

It’s just that the volunteers weren’t very good at putting out fires. In lieu of letting well-meaning amateurs fail to prevent homes and workplaces from burning to the ground, cities and towns were happy to replace them with full-time professionals as soon as they could afford to. As with fire-fighting, so with the efficacious management of a whole range of municipal responsibilities. Soft Despotism deserves to be widely read, but even if it is universally read it is unlikely to cause the firings of hundreds of city managers, triggered by newly engaged citizens eager to assert their prerogatives and demonstrate their abilities to draft zoning codes and economic-development plans.

But if Rahe is unrealistic in some regards, he has nonetheless written a fine book. It is to be hoped that Rahe and other equally thoughtful conservatives will treat Soft Despotism’s conclusion as the point of departure for additional books. Those volumes will bear down on the question of what 21st-century conservatives can change and what they cannot: which battles can be won, and how they can be won; which battles are lost, and how to decide between prudently accepting or valiantly denying those defeats.