What is the significance of democracy in america

For good or for ill. For Tocqueville, democracy is not primarily a system of government, but a social order and way of life, marked by public debate, constant elections, the popular press, and social equality. The America that he discovered in was rapidly democratizing in this sense. He traveled in the age of Andrew Jackson, when the nation was bursting with commercial and political activity.

Most government was still local at the time, and Washington, D. Democracy was rough and tumble, and it was local: For decades, local officials had been appointed non-democratically but in the s, officials were elected. The National Bank prompted great debate, familiar to us now, about the size and extent of the national government.

America was not alone, as Tocqueville well knew: The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw democracy in this sense expanding across the globe. Great Britain, for instance, passed the Reform Act of , dramatically expanding the franchise.

The Industrial Revolution was taking place across Europe, America, and Asia, creating new opportunities and decimating older notions of imperial privilege, forms of production, and ways of life.

Tocqueville was also an insightful observer of a second global trend taking place in his day-- the rising power of the state. These are the most reliable history extant of democracy in America. There have been more than two hundred of these constitutions in this country since June, In the only one of the eighteenth century which continues in force, that of Massachusetts of , the state is declared to be a contract.

The evolution of these two ideas is the history of American politics. Democracy in America records the contest between laws—a conventional system of politics—and men struggling for industrial freedom.

This is shown in the history of the franchise: from a franchise limited to white males, possessing a prescribed amount of real estate, confessing to belief in a prescribed creed, to a manhood and womanhood suffrage untethered by such limitations. In these state constitutions the experience in administration has passed over into formal statements in the bills of rights.

These brief clauses of have grown into a treatise on civil principles in the present state constitutions.

Industrial life wrought this change. The provisions in these bills are the generalizations on industrial data which record the evolution of democracy in America. Whatever discord may at present rage in the state, it is but the continuation of the old discord between desire and performance, between conditions in the evolution of government and the selfishness of men. But as liberty may run into license in politics, so it may in the industrial world.

That world has its order and its chaos, its desire and its performance, its theory and its administration. Perhaps it is unfortunate for the fate of democracy in America that we have always attempted to interpret it politically. Our books represent it as a political device. It has become almost axiomatic with us to seek the solution of the questions in the state by a political agreement rather than by a better industrial organization. Politics and labor are the democratic team, but politics leads.

The state, if corrupt, is regarded as politically corrupt. Industry has been the shuttlecock of politics, and those who labor have been viewed as the beneficiaries of the state, and not truly as the statesmen. They exist independent of the form of government. It was long thought that political equality would secure industrial equality, but the effort to read industrial equality into life has not yet been an unqualified success.

At present, the theory is winning popular support that the government, the public business of the state, should be made an industrial, as long ago it was made a political copartner.

Democracy is now construed towards communism, towards a labor copartnership. The political copartnership, on the basis of equality, having failed to make each of the statesmen rich, those who have not suspect those who have as robbers, and look upon the state as the chief robber of all.

In other words, democracy, in America, is showing its material side. Men are not content with the mere blessings of political liberty; they demand wealth wherewith to enjoy the blessings. In a democracy Nemesis is active. The privileges of democracy breed discontent. Whatever the form or the idea of the state, man cannot get rid of himself. His philosophy, his vagaries, his stomach, are always with him. Democracy is not an insurance against the consequences of being born into the world.

It is no panacea. The state is no better than the men and women in it; it can do no more than they. A sound statesmanship starts with a sound man. If no such man exists, then he must develop before the healthy state can come.

And the people know this; whence their lack of reverence for the state. It is a thing which they made, and they know its imperfections. Did the farmer make the apple, or the gardener the flower? It is not only political, but industrial honesty that we need.

The coin that is current in a sound state has two sides. Two centuries ago, democracy was necessitated by forests to be cleared, mines to be worked, fields to be ploughed, things to be made. This was at the threshold of a material age in the evolution of democracy. Some rude adjustments must be expected in politics, while yet the industrial apparatus of the people is rude. The intricacies of democracy do not disclose themselves at first view. It is the administration of government in a democracy that tests its strength.

An untouched continent afforded the material opportunity of the modern world. That opportunity was America.

Now that the plough has furrowed across the continent, that the primeval forest has been cut down, that the first output of the mines has made this operation more difficult and less remunerative, an industrial adjustment is necessary. The process of that adjustment is complicated, because it involves both the politics and the labor of the states-men. It demands political recognition. Labor calls upon the state for a guarantee.

Labor seeks a political formula by which every man may gain wealth. There is no doubt that this condition implies changes in the state. Is the state hereafter to be defined as an industrial corporation, a copartnership of men for things? Is the state to he conceived in this material philosophy as a factory for the general welfare? Is it a device to assist those to acquire wealth who are incapable of themselves to acquire it?

Is society to be divided into two groups: first, the state and the poor; second, the rich? Is democracy in America, like monarchy and aristocracy in Europe, to develop class interests, — those of the house of Have, and those of the house of Want? Our democracy is evidently in a rudimentary stage. In spite of our suspicions of its defects, we like the reformers and their reforms no better. We are certain of one error, — the opinion that our democratic institutions would correct the ills of mankind.

Wealth brings leisure, and leisure breeds criticism and discontent. A portion of our discontent arises from our limited notions of a democracy. It consists of more than meat and drink and a ballot. The whole man is involved in it. He is somewhat more than an economic integer.

His world is also moral and metaphysical. Material results will never satisfy him. The range of his activities is beyond the merely industrial treadmill.

Our boasted mechanical devices are in vain, if the gain by them is merely more material. This is not surprising; it is, in fact, the necessary consequence of what I have advanced above. Almost all the Americans are in easy circumstances and can therefore obtain the first elements of human knowledge. Now, every profession requires an apprenticeship.

The Americans can devote to general education only the early years of life. At fifteen they enter upon their calling, and thus their education generally ends at the age when ours begins. If it is continued beyond that point, it aims only towards a particular specialized and profitable purpose; one studies science as one takes up a business; and one takes up only those applications whose immediate practicality is recognized.

In America most of the rich men were formerly poor; most of those who now enjoy leisure were absorbed in business during their youth; the consequence of this is that when they might have had a taste for study, they had no time for it, and when the time is at their disposal, they have no longer the inclination.

There is no class, then, in America, in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor.

America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon. Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.

This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. Not that those nations whose social condition is democratic naturally despise liberty; on the contrary, they have an instinctive love of it. But liberty is not the chief and constant object of their desires; equality is their idol : they make rapid and sudden efforts to obtain liberty and, if they miss their aim, resign themselves to their disappointment; but nothing can satisfy them without equality, and they would rather perish than lose it.

On the other hand, in a state where the citizens are all practically equal, it becomes difficult for them to preserve their independence against the aggressions of power. No one among them being strong enough to engage in the struggle alone with advantage, nothing but a general combination can protect their liberty. Now, such a union is not always possible.

The Anglo-Americans are the first nation who, having been exposed to this formidable alternative, have been happy enough to escape the dominion of absolute power. They have been allowed by their circumstances, their origin, their intelligence, and especially by their morals to establish and maintain the sovereignty of the people. According to Tocqueville, what were the consequences of Americans pursuing vocational education at age 15 years?

According to Tocqueville, in a nation characterized by democracy, which of two important goals, liberty or equality, takes precedence? According to Tocqueville, how can citizens who are equal to one another resist abuses by the powerful to protect their liberty?