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Alexis, Lorenzo and the 18 - percenters

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian who wrote “Democracy in America” in 1835, has fed public debate ever since his first book…

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Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian who wrote “Democracy in America” in 1835, has fed public debate ever since his first book appeared.

He was from an aristocratic family, was exiled in England during the French Revolution and then returned to France. In 1831, he came to the United States, with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, to study the prison system, but his first volume was about his travels and how the markets, Western expansion, and Jacksonian democracy were transforming life in this young nation.

Democracy was the fulcrum that balanced the quests for liberty and equality. (Well, not quite, because slavery did not allow liberty, equality, nor democracy.) Servitude, which Tocqueville opposed, was the great contradiction embedded inside the high ideals of the nation’s founding.

Otherwise, he observed the United States didn’t have an aristocratic ethic. It was a society motivated by hard work for people to become better off by making money, giving a common man an unprecedented dignity.  People didn’t have to cow-tow to elites. Individualism and market capitalism were at the root. The democratic system had a new way to confront unresolved issues when the old, tired, decrepit ways failed.

Tocqueville had a predecessor who also came to observe the United States from abroad. He tested his powers of insight about society, politics, and peoplehood in a democracy.

Lorenzo de Zavala wrote “Journey to the United States of North America,” a book about democratic culture. It first appeared in France in 1831. The English translation wasn’t published until 1980, a century and a half later.

Zavala was a liberal (as in “liberty,” not as in Democratic Party), a seminary graduate, and founder of newspapers in Yucatán, Mexico. He was imprisoned for his views and his journalism by the Spanish colonial government. Fluent in several languages, he taught himself from medical books and became a doctor while in prison.

He was among the drafters of the first Mexican constitution (which abolished slavery) and one of the first transnationals of his time — between Mexico, France, Texas and the U.S. — who saw the connection between how people live and participation in how they are governed, a view that didn’t become common until the invention of sociology and political science.

Like Tocqueville, Zavala recognized that the society and politics taking shape in the United States were significant but not necessarily a template for Mexico. The United States had a slave history to reconcile. Its “equality” ideals did not match the reality. Mexico’s colonial history, in turn, had “servile” elements that tended toward centrist government. Tocqueville, meanwhile, had recognized France had residue aristocratic and empire-seeking impediments to democracy.

If a Tocqueville or a Zavala were writing about U.S. society today, that book would probably say that U.S. culture, like the expanding universe, moved further away from an untenable past in 2008, and became more in sync with the challenges to confront in the new century.

Barack Obama’s election was an important break with the past, as were Andrew Jackson’s and Abraham Lincoln’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s and John Kennedy’s. Their elections, like a practical not just a theoretical democracy, signified the triumph of optimism, referred to as “hope” during the recent campaign.    

So what’s all the protest shouting and anger and talk of weapons and calling people “isms” and spitting and expletives all about?

It’s the counter-revolution to optimism. The angry words, dour looks, the staccato, cliché-driven rhetoric turns refreshing spring rain into dill pickle soup.

Tocqueville and Zavala would understand that. Rhetoric aside, those 18 percent of our nation who identify with the Tea-Party movement are like the aristocrats of their time who didn’t like hope — her, optimism — and instead dreamed of restoring the façade of a better time that wasn’t.

 

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