Perhaps the most prescient and melancholy chapter in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” which appears in the second volume of that great work. If despotism were to establish itself in modern democratic nations, Tocqueville predicted, it is likely that it would assume a different character from the tyrannies other regimes have from time to time given rise to. Democratic despotism, he says, would “be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.” In this sense, Tocqueville continues, “the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world.”  

It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. … it eve ...

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 16 April 1998, on page 1
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