Principles and Heresies

America: No Imperial Rome

It is hard to think of a European who has ever written about America as it is. In European thought the United States always plays a pat role—hero or villain—designed to promote a moral in whatever intellectual or psychic drama is afoot. Even so great a book as Democracy in America distorts the American reality in order that America may play its proper part in Alexis de Tocqueville’s magnificent dramatic tragedy upon the theme of democracy in Western civilization.