Boys and dads gather for lunch in Chattanooga during a Trail Life USA work day. The group teaches character and manly Christian virtues. Leader of the homeschool chapter is Ben Fisher, with the beard.
By David Tulis
Tyranny. Despotism. Words such as these are frequently on the lips of people. Many people who agree with the Christian and libertarian critique of federal misgovernment give the impression they are shouting at the tops of their lungs.
As they tell it, America is about to fall. If Republicans aren’t elected, they say, we will lose our freedoms. Another year of President Obama will deliver us to absolute tyranny. The forecasts are dire, and I feel only discouragement listening to them.
Amid the din, I am glad to hear gracious, refined and understated descriptions of what ails national and local economy. Alexis de Tocqueville explains where we are in an 1840 book, Democracy in America. We are a breed of men, he says of us Americans in the late 1830s, facing what he calls democratic tyranny.
How our will to freedom curbed
“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. 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 is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances — what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
“Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
“I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described, might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the
people.”
How to be led and to lead
“Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities,they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain.
“By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Schocken Books, 1974, 1961, 1840), Vol. 2, pp. 381, 381. Thanks to Rev. Robert McCurry of Newnan, Ga., for making note of this passage.
