Toronto Star Referrer

U.S. democracy is old and fragile

RICK SALUTIN RICK SALUTIN IS A FREELANCE CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST FOR THE STAR. HE IS BASED IN TORONTO. REACH HIM VIA EMAIL: SALUTINRICK@GMAIL.COM

“Democracy in America” was a great book title in 1835 when it appeared, and it still is — though you might want to add a question mark. It was written by Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, after an eight-month visit to the U.S.

I awoke alertly in the middle of the night recently and, following the advice of the sleep mavens, switched on the light and reached for a book. I believe firmly in the destiny theory of whatever book finds it way into your hands at those moments. This one was a biography of Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz called “The Man Who Understood Democracy,” though “The Man Who Needed to Understand Democracy” might’ve served better.

It worked and I fell back asleep. What the bio of an author provides is context for their actual books. I’d read “Democracy in America” as an undergrad in Boston, when I was excited by the U.S. — its civil rights struggles, its culture, its energy! Tocqueville went there in its early years, when conflicts were even rawer: slavery versus abolition; relations with still sovereign Indigenous nations. There was no guarantee it would survive. Thirty years later, Abraham Lincoln prayed that “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Failure was still an option.

I’d say the current context resonates again with that. Except there’s less hope and more doubt. Donald Trump, who has dominated U.S. politics for nearly a decade, has never said a good word for democracy. Believe me, I’ve looked. (Canadians are like perpetual Tocquevilles, always studying the U.S. to divine what it might mean for us. Tocqueville too sought clues. He did it all his life. His last book was “The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution.”)

The U.S. didn’t invent democracy, and that isn’t what inspired Tocqueville on his travels. There were other models: ancient Athens, Switzerland, or the Iroquois Confederacy — which U.S. founding father Benjamin Franklin knew and particularly admired. Britain had its version. Humankind will always generate new democratic variants; it seems inherent.

But what appealed to a young nobleman who’d had family members guillotined during the French Revolution and who sympathized with the failed Paris Uprising of 1832 (eulogized in “Les Misérables”) was the absence of the chains of tradition and history that burdened Europe. America was troubled, but not feudal or hidebound; it had the vitality to overcome massive problems.

Yet it wasn’t to be, at least not yet, and meanwhile the energy has faded. This week in the New York Times, Paul Krugman sought a comparison for the major regressions seen in the U.S. today, among them the rollback of abortion and voting rights. He settled on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. My nominee would be the backlash against Reconstruction shortly after the Civil War. Someone recently told me that “forty acres and a mule” was a great idea. It was the 1865 plan by Union general William T. Sherman to grant property to former slaves and decisively annihilate the legacy of slavery and poverty. After Lincoln’s assassination three months later, it collapsed.

What seems familiar in Tocqueville’s connection to the U.S. — at least to me, as I slid comfortably back into sleep — isn’t that it was admirable but that it was intriguing; there was something to be learned. Democracy in America then was new and fragile. Today, it’s old and fragile — without the same potential.

So if you published “Democracy in America” today, you might add the question mark. And if the answer is no, that poses a challenge to the rest of us, in the absence of an exemplary model. Europeans particularly are faced with that challenge, even as America, through the war in Ukraine, claims to assert its indispensability.

Another observant European, Sigmund Freud, also visited the U.S. once, in 1909. He called it, in his wicked way, a mistake. “A gigantic mistake, it is true, but nonetheless, a mistake.” He admired the scale of the effort but little else.

OPINION

en-ca

2022-07-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-07-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thestarepaper.pressreader.com/article/281827172459776

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