American democracy is an amazing, fascinating, bewildering thing. There has never been anything else like it.
Even now, as democracy becomes an ever more familiar feature of our world, there is still nothing like the American version. During the early years of the American republic, in the first half of the 19th century, what fascinated outsiders was its sheer implausibility. Could you really do politics like this, with such fractured and chaotic popular input? It seemed unlikely anything so ramshackle could last long. It was also implausible, especially to British eyes, for the simple reason that it was so clearly fraudulent: slavery made a mockery of it.
A democracy with slavery is different from one that abolishes it; a democracy that denies the vote to women can’t be compared to one that grants it; a democracy of 13 states is nothing like one with fifty. Despite these changes, it’s the features that have remained constant which stand out. The most celebrated is the constitution, a uniquely durable – or to put it another way, a remarkably entrenched – document.
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Two very different books published within a year of each other in the mid-1980s give a sense of the uncertainty. Despite their differences, both seem prescient today. One is The Cycles of American History by Arthur Schlesinger, which came out in 1986. Schlesinger, who had been court historian at Camelot and was a lifelong New Dealer
as moving through generational shifts from a passive to an active mode, or from what he called destiny politics to experimental realism. When destiny had America in its grip, people fell back on the foundational myths of individualism, independence and freedom from government interference. Then, when that politics of faith ran into trouble (as it inevitably had to), people turned back to the government: 1986, the height of the Reagan revolution, looked to Schlesinger like the trough of one such cycle of excessive faith in free-market individualism, which would switch back in due course to something more statist.American politics has a tendency to indulge in unsustainable bouts of wishful thinking about free markets and to promote excessive mistrust in government. Then, after a decade or two, the people wake up, and the ship of state slowly rights itself.
The British historian Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of of the Great Powers, published in 1987, offers a very different view. This is not the story of twenty to thirty-year cycles of intervention and laissez-faire, but of two to three hundred-year cycles of imperial ascendancy and decline. Rising powers eventually overextend themselves. They take on military and domestic commitments that they lack the resources to meet. They are insufficiently adaptable and can’t make the necessary sacrifices. So it all unravels in the end. Why should America be any different? In 1988 Kennedy’s prognosis of doom became a talking point in the election campaign between Bush senior and Dukakis (Bush used Kennedy’s book as another stick to beat the doomy Dukakis with, knowing full well that optimism wins elections). In the 1990s it became routine to laugh at Kennedy – here was another whiny Brit who bet against America and lost, as people who bet against America always do. Kennedy had thought that the regular budget deficits during the Reagan years of more than 5 per cent were sure evidence of impending ruin; then Clinton balanced the budget. But Kennedy doesn’t look so foolish now. These days, after the excesses of the last ten years, a budget deficit of 5 per cent is held up as a badge of probity, and can be achieved only through significant cuts to the military. This certainly looks like an overextended empire.
Schlesinger heralded Tocqueville as the man who foresaw the endless back and forth of American democracy, from active to passive, from progressive to complacent, from volume one of Democracy in America (with its anxieties about the tyranny of the restless majority) to volume two (with its fears about the mild despotism of comfortable public opinion). Schlesinger’s Tocqueville understood the rhythms of a democratic people: they hope to do without government, until they grow impatient with the inability of government to help them. Kennedy’s Tocqueville understood the deeper rhythms of geopolitics: how peoples rise and how they fall.
Tocqueville wasn’t a prophet – there are no prophets, least of all in politics. Instead, Tocqueville stumbled across a simple truth that helps explain the difficulty of knowing how much trouble American democracy is in.
His fundamental insight comes from the first-hand experiences he gained travelling in America as a young man in 1831 (the journey that formed the basis of Democracy in America). Tocqueville was an aristocrat and a bit of a snob. He shared the common European prejudice that American democracy was an implausible project – hence his desire to see it for himself.
He got off the boat in New York, and like many first-time visitors was overwhelmed by what he found. His first impression was that it was a mess: stupid, chaotic, haphazard, impatient, relentless. He didn’t see how it could possibly work.
But after he had been in the country for a while and travelled outside New York, he decided that American democracy was not nearly as bad as it looked. It does work, despite appearances. It has an underlying stability and adaptability that is not visible on the surface of events. Tocqueville concluded that American democracy has something curiously opaque about it: the underlying story never quite reaches the surface in time for anyone to recognise what’s going on. That’s why democracy requires faith: not just religious faith (though Americans have plenty of that), but also faith in democracy, a confidence born of the belief that things are never as bad as they appear. Tocqueville said of American democracy that more goes wrong, but more gets done as well, which means nothing bad lasts for long. Or as he put it elsewhere: more fires get started, but more fires get put out.
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