Our Democracy in America Read Along

Throughout 2024, our community slowly read through Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic, Democracy in America. This book has a surprising amount to teach us about our modern political climate, as well as how we got here. As we close out the year, Sarah and Beth close out our read along and reflect on what they learned about the present by looking to the past.

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DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA READ ALONG SERIES

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TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.  

Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.  

Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.  

[00:00:29] Thank you so much for joining us today. It is the last day of 2024. We did it. Let's just take a minute and celebrate that we made it through this year.  

Sarah [00:00:39] Bye. That's all I have to say to her, bye.  

Beth [00:00:42] So we are closing the book on this year as we close out Alexis de Tocqueville's classic Democracy in America. We've been slowly reading this book with the Spice Cabinet, our premium community on Substack all year, reflecting on observations made in the 18th century that still feel extremely relevant today. So today we are going to wrap up that series. If you want to go back and listen, we'll put all of the previous episodes in our show notes. It really has been a helpful exercise and if you enjoy this conversation, we hope that you'll consider joining us on Substack for more projects like this.  

[00:01:19] Music Interlude.  

[00:01:29] At Pantsuit Politics we really value reading of many different types of texts. So, Sarah, you had the idea that we should, in the year 2024, read together slowly the classic democracy in America from Alexis de Tocqueville. And I am wondering, as we have reached the end of the year and the end of the book, what your expectations were when we started and if this exercise has met your expectations.  

Sarah [00:01:57] I'm not sure how strong my expectations were. I just felt like it was important to read. I love a classic. This felt like an appropriate classic in the year of democracy, not just in America, but around the world. And I knew just enough to be dangerous about Alexis de Tocqueville's trip across America 175 plus years ago. So much so that I set us all on a book that's actually a bridge, just that we didn't even actually read the full text. We did read a bridge copy, but whatever. And I knew that it was a seminal text because people feel like his observations are still so relevant. So I was prepared to feel that, but probably not quite to the level that I did where it felt like, whoa, he really saw it, got it. The human pattern of democracy, even though democracy, particularly in America, was so young, he really had scoped out. He really had gotten a feel for it. And I think he has been proven quite prescient.  

Beth [00:03:05] This exercise has made me want to go back and read a number of texts that I was exposed to in college as a person with more life experience. Do you remember when we went to Transylvania? The first class we had to take was called Foundations of Liberal Arts.  

Sarah [00:03:19] Yeah. FLA.  

Beth [00:03:20] I would like to get the syllabus for that, for FLA.  

Sarah [00:03:24] You know what, Beth? I probably still have it.  

Beth [00:03:26] If you could dig it out, I would like to read some of this text again, just with the benefit of the experiences that I have now in life and the benefit of understanding that reading a text that is a classic carries a weight and that you read it differently than you would read something else because of its enduring quality. I keep thinking as we read this book about what enabled him to see the human condition so clearly. One of the things I've noticed in all of this look back at 2024 that we've done over the past couple of weeks in our own research and reading is that I have too often shrunk my thinking to fit the terms of whatever is happening in the news cycle. This book was made possible by the expansiveness of his thinking. He arrived in America and looked around and thought about everything from political science to poetry in putting these observations together and I don't do enough of that, so I found it really inspiring in that way.  

Sarah [00:04:32] Well, do you remember how clarifying the election was this year? How you kind of woke up and couldn't stop thinking about it? And it just felt like this flood of information and insight that had been held back and it was released all of a sudden. I think you and I both had a very similar experience. Can you imagine what something like the French Revolution would open up in you as a French aristocrat? Sort of scales from the eyes. You can't lie to yourself. What was I ignoring? What did I know I was ignoring the whole time, particularly about human nature, how it functions inside the old system, what it's going to mean inside a new system. I would think a historical event on the level of the French Revolution would really uncork some things within you. And that's what I felt from him. I felt like I am past the point of lying to myself. I'm not trying to prop up my own society. My own society has given me this truth serum so I can see everybody else's really clearly, because I think that's part of it. Is that he was an outsider, that he was coming here with a clarifying or what I imagine would be clarifying experience in France and was ready to see everything here very, very clearly.  

Beth [00:05:50] So let's talk about what he saw. One of the major themes of this book, probably the central theme of the book, is the idea that Americans are so obsessed with being equal to each other while also maintaining our individuality that we are in a much more tenuous relationship with freedom than we like to think.  

Sarah [00:06:13] Yeah. In the last section of the book that we just finished, Book Four, and throughout the book there is this ongoing conversation about equality and how it can make everything the same. But Americans are so focused on staying unique that there's this real central tension. He says at one point, Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. And listen, I have been thinking about this a lot. I've been reading a lot about the Post 2024 election analysis and the obsession, particularly in progressive circles with equity and how there was this conversation about, well, should we hold other groups back in order to achieve that equity? And I think what de Tocqueville saw and what is still true is that no Americans want equality. They don't want equity. They want equality. They want to feel like we're all being treated the same. That people are not looking for any institution, but particularly the institution of the state to put its hands on the scale for a certain group at expense of another group. That one of the founding principles of equality, that all men are created equal, really motivates so much, but that it is always held in tension because we want to be treated equally to pursue our own unique vision of our own lives. That's the central tension here that I think he named so well.  

Beth [00:07:43] But we also can't feel a sense of equality around that unique vision of our lives unless it looks pretty similar to other people's lives. And this helps me explain to myself what feels like an overwhelming contradiction in our society right now where people are extremely unhappy about income inequality, status inequality, the sort of ruling class of billionaires while also completely celebrating, supporting, uplifting, elevating the ruling class of billionaires through the election. And I think that that is just a reminder that we are always holding in our hands this desire for things to be fair. I think we might, in our modern conventions, use fair in places where de Tocqueville uses equality. We want things to be fair. But we also don't want anyone to tell us how to get there. And that just leads us to places that are not that different than what we might get if we were back in the pre French Revolution era.  

Sarah [00:08:53] Well, I think the sameness, before I get to your internal conflict, at the end he says, "In modern society, everything threatens to become so much alike that the peculiar characteristics of each individual soon be entirely lost in the general aspect of the world." If that's not a critique of Instagram, I don't know what is.  

Beth [00:09:10] Yes.  

Sarah [00:09:10] And so, I think you're right. It's like we want to be able to succeed. We want to be unique, but not. We want to succeed in the vision of everyone else's version of success. And that tension between how we hold up people and then are angry all the time at the people we're holding up. I think he names that really well around the federal government as well. He talks a lot about the centralization and that's what you hear all the time. I feel like the overarching narrative I hear from Americans is I hate the government and why don't they fix everything?  

Beth [00:09:41] Yes.  

Sarah [00:09:42] But I don't know what that means. And I don't think de Tocqueville did either, but he sure saw it coming. 

Beth [00:09:49] Yes, I completely agree with you. I thought about Instagram constantly reading these observations about equality and individualism. I thought about how this helps explain why we have become a society of so much cheap stuff, dupes on every corner. Because if I can't afford the $300 bag, then give me a $40 one that looks like it. So I still have a sense that I belong here and I'm not relegated forever to some separate social class. I think so much of where we have landed in America now can be explained by that tension. I think all that ties to his second big bucket of observations, which is just that a democracy runs on the majority and the majority ends up being pretty tyrannical.  

Sarah [00:10:38] Yeah. This is not attention he was naming for the first time. Obviously, the founding fathers were very concerned about the majority. Well, what do we do if they make a bad call which they inevitably will and which we inevitably will? At one point, de Tocqueville says if ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority. And I think to me so much of what he is talking about before he had language for it is psychology, not democracy. That we're social creatures, that we respond to each other, that we really don't want to be outliers, that we want the success, but we want to feel held up, supported, connected, confirmed, praised by all the people around us. And when you're saying, okay, well, the direction is going to come from that majority, it's not coming from God through the figure of a king; it's not coming from God through like a pope; it's coming through the majority because that's what we're shifting from. We're shifting from the idea that the leaders were chosen by God. And so if their chosen by people and people are flawed, then how is that going to play out?  

Beth [00:11:56] And I think we're always grappling with the power of being able to vote. That you have the power of your vote, but that that power is very limited. It is constrained to just your vote. And we don't really know how to hold that. And we're not very good at putting society in containers the way that he does throughout this book. He really thinks about the difference between government and federal government and local government and religion as something else and civil society as something else. And we don't really do that. And the tyranny of the majority to me in America has spilled into every space. I think about the fact that people flooded that McDonald's in Pennsylvania with online reviews after an employee recognized the UHC CEO shooter.  

Sarah [00:12:46] And the backpack guy is getting threats.  

Beth [00:12:50] Yes. And so every place that we have the power of our vote, but only the power of our vote, we've kind of bled that into corporate life and consumerism and our behavior on social media. And we keep creating platforms that feel kind of like democracy where you have what you say, but that's all you have. And so we keep trying to find ways to infuse that with more and more power. And I don't really love what it's doing for us.  

Sarah [00:13:20] Well, I keep thinking about that with relationship to fandom. Which I think if you'd given de Tocqueville enough time, he probably could have identified or if you'd brought him a little later into the media landscape. Because this idea of fandom that people can become so consumed by their participation as a majority, they feel that they are participating, that they have some ownership, that they have some claim, but they know that it's a small claim and so they try to grasp more. It's always this reaching for power, it feels like. Or control of some type. You know you're in it, but you're not in it as much as you wish. You don't have as much control as you wish you did. Or you imbue it with more importance in your life than it actually does, because I think that's what he gets at with the religion and civil society, is that politics and governance and democracy is just one piece of the puzzle.  

[00:14:26] And I think what we're dealing with now is that it's become the only piece of the puzzle. That so many of the institutions he names-- I can't believe we haven't seen Christian nationalist quoting this line from him that religion America was their first political institution. Feels like something they'd get their little claws into. But that this sense that these were all working together, that the role of religion and civil society and the press and public education, that these were all a piece of the puzzle, that they were gears interlocked in this project of democracy. And I think right now what we're experiencing and what has brought so many of his prescient concerns to the forefront, to feel like we're really living out what he was worried about is the fact that these other institutions that were supposed to balance and interact with democracy have faded so much from public life.  

Beth [00:15:22] And he saw some of that coming. He is not impressed in his visit to America with our education. He's impressed that we want everybody to have it. But he talks about how it's just not as good as the education that you would receive if you were of the noble class in Europe. And so he's sort of naming the flattening out of everything that we've experienced and warning about it. I wonder if some of his comments about religion are a way of saying, but maybe here's the light. They're trying to excel. And he talked about the differences in communities within the country in terms of the dominant religious thinking in those communities and what a difference it made. And I think he saw those differences as a strength while still seeing some overall warning about how most of us principally are consumed with economic prosperity. Because we were able to reach unprecedented levels of economic prosperity and unlimited in how far we might go from where our parents were that that was our driving force. And I think he kept looking to religion to be something that moderated that and contained it and put some guardrails around it. And I don't know that that's panned out for us on the whole.  

Sarah [00:16:55] I just think you can never underestimate how different things were before. Of course, we were consumed literally and figuratively with our economic prosperity because that was a new experience and most of human history. Like in most of human history, how you were born is how you would die. My friend and I just finished a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi and his devotion to poverty in the face of sort of the medieval papacy. I was like, it's hard for us to comprehend. It was a caste system. It wasn't a social system. It was a caste system. And I know that we still have a long way to go. But comparatively to most of human history, being in a place in a country where there was this American dream where you could pursue outside of the structure, the limits of your birth, a bigger economic reality for yourself, was just unheard of. It just was unheard of. And I think he got that this is powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility. He names a lot the pursuit of happiness. He says the taste for material enjoyments must be regarded as the first source of danger to America. It's the source of all the fuel for the American experiment. And also, it could burn us up in the end.  

Beth [00:18:21] And in the end of the book, he talks about how those private pursuits that consume us mean that we have very little time for civic life. Which was one of the most relevant parts of the book to me, that we are so busy pursuing happiness on our terms, pursuing material enjoyment that we neglect the civic sphere. And then we get unhappy with the civic sphere. And he talks about how our biggest passion, when we think about what the civic sphere can offer us, is order. And I felt that connected so much to that sort of day after the 2024 election clarity that you described.  

Sarah [00:19:06] It's so funny. We are rewatching The Sopranos with Griffin and we're in season four and there's this great moment where Tony Soprano is in a conversation with a woman he has recently had an affair with who is Russian. She's a Russian immigrant and she says, "You Americans."  

Clip from "The Sopranos"[00:19:24] That's the trouble with you Americans. Expect nothing bad ever to happen when the rest of the world expect only bad to happen. And they are not disappointed. You have everything and still you complain. Lying on couches and bitch to a psychiatrist. You get too much time to think about yourselves.  

Sarah [00:19:43] Tony becomes really consumed with this take and sees it as so true. And that makes sense, right? Because I think you hear that so much in immigrants. They left places where there was no order. That's why they came to America. It's not just the pursuit of economic freedom; it's the pursuit of economic prosperity.  

[00:20:01] Because there is a foundation of order upon which to build and I think that the reality that we take it for granted in some ways. In some ways we speak loudly with the tyranny of majority and say we don't like anything we perceive as disorder, no matter how much it is, it's nothing compared to what people may be experiencing around the globe. Like it's too much for us. But at the same time, we are still obsessed with the happiness and the everything's just not quite ready for us. Everything's not quite the way we want it. Because I do think happiness is really not the point. I don't know if we should rewrite the Constitution, but I do think the pursuit of happiness, de Tocqueville named well, is sort of an ever evading goal that can really tie you up in knots.  

Beth [00:20:53] Well, it comes through throughout the book that maybe what we mean by the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of comfort. He talks about our desire for comfort over and over. And I think that what we're struggling with right now is that that desire for comfort has subverted a pursuit of purpose for most people. Because another thing that you hear when you spend time with people, especially people who recently immigrated to America, they so value hard work. Talking to a recent immigrant about the value of hard work often reminds me of talking to someone from the Silent Generation about hard work. I think we are really struggling generationally with the conversations about quiet quitting and what AI is going to do to us and universal basic income and sort of ideas about whether we should have to put it all on the field; whether we should expend all this private effort chasing comfort and chasing economic prosperity. It seems like a number of people who are about our age are sick of that and look ahead and around and think, this has made us exhausted. It has made us ill. It has made us stressed. It is reducing our life expectancy. And at the same time, this is deeply encoded in the DNA of who we are as a country and people who have lived here and been here for generations feel that and people come here for that. And that's a tough tension that we're working through.  

Sarah [00:22:33] Yeah, I mean, it's nothing but the paradox of America that we are pursuing economic opportunity at the expense of our own individual happiness, at the expense of our civic institutions, but that it is the center flame that keeps everything alive. And I think that's what de Tocqueville names so well. And he just gets at it. He sees this paradox all across America that what makes it great is what ultimately could put it at risk. And so I wonder now, as we've completed this slow read, what do you think he would think about America today? Do you think he'd be cynical about our opportunity? Do you think he'd see us as a fading empire? What would confirm his observations and what would he see as just the same cyclical battles we go through between individualism and equality and the tyranny of the majority?  

Beth [00:23:35] I think he would be most surprised by our history of war because he writes in the book about how we are geographically isolated and protected. And so we are unlikely to endure war the way that European countries have endured war.  

Sarah [00:23:51] Hard to see missiles and drones coming. That's a tough one.  

Beth [00:23:54] Yes. But also that we have chosen to go out into the world, into war over and over in circumstances that I think would blow his mind. I think he would wonder why on earth we searched for this? Now, he did talk about how once you've created a military, you've got people who have skills that they want to use. And so maybe he would be less surprised than I think. But our interventionism, I think, would be surprising to him. And the technology that we have now for weapons of war, I think would surprise him. I think he would feel really confirmed in his take about education. I think that the way that we use technology completely tracks with what he saw in the human psyche. I don't know how optimistic he would be about our ability to work our way out of the problems that we face around technology right now. What do you think?  

Sarah [00:24:47] I think that he would be surprised by this sort of all powerful unitary executive. I think he probably saw Congress as more of a bulwark than it ultimately has ended up being. And I think that he would be surprised by the fading of so many of our civic institutions and the pressure upon the press and the failing role of religion. I think in particular for that period in human history religion still seemed all powerful. And anticipating a time where society would be a secular as it is would probably be pretty surprising. But I got to believe that he would still be bullish on American democracy because how could you not be? If life is as different as it is from when he was walking the roads of America over 175 years ago, and still we're here and still we have these democratic institutions and still we are struggling with these tensions and still we pursue happiness and we struggle with the sameness, if it's still prescient, it's still prescient. It means we're still battling these things that he named. Despite the massive and rapid pace of change that has taken place in America. So I think he would still say, well, if it's still relevant then it's still relevant and that has to be good. Because if he was wrong, if the tension wasn't there, if the institutions that he named, even the ones that have weakened weren't real and the foundation wasn't strong, it wouldn't be prescient, it would be out of date. We'd be gone. There would be no America. There would be no American democracy upon which to test the staying power of de Tocqueville's observations.  

Beth [00:26:34] He seemed to view some form of democracy as inevitable throughout the world, that people are on the path to wishing for more equality of circumstance and of political power. And he recognizes, as the book closes, that the more you gain that sense of equality, the more likely you are to be vulnerable to despotism. And he says it's not going to look like it used to look. It's not going to be the heavy handed despotism that fell most harshly on a few people in society. It is going to be subtler and more pervasive. It is going to be a form of despotism that spreads across the population because we like everything to be equal and we're going to be less present to it. If I could ask him a question today, I would say, what does that portend for revolution? You who saw the French Revolution, what is the next iteration of people getting fed up going to look like when that heavy handedness of government has been walked into in the way that it seems like is kind of the next wave here and across the globe.  

Sarah [00:27:49] Yeah, I kept thinking about him during this year of elections that we've experienced where the majority of the world's population participated in elections of varying levels of freedom and fairness. But the idea that even the despots that de Tocqueville would recognize, (Vladimir Putin's pretend to have elections) that's the way democracy is spread. That even when it's not democratic, we want it to look like it because that's the idea that takes hold. That's the idea that's viral. That takes off in people's minds. And particularly as society gets more and more modern and is shaped by the world that democracy is created and particularly American democracy is created. You can't put Pandora back in the box. You can't put the idea that all men are created equal back in the history books. Once people know it, they know it. And I think that he saw that. He saw the power of that and the fact that you couldn't contain it once it had been released.  

[00:28:45] Music Interlude.  

Beth [00:28:55] We are going to continue slow reading by taking on Habits of the Heart next. Habits of the Heart was written by Robert Bellah and his coauthors, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Stephen M Tipton. It was written in 1985, and we are going to read it because it's a phrase de Tocqueville uses in Democracy in America. And when we told former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, as one does, that we were reading Democracy in America, she said, "You've got to read Habits of the heart, too." And that seemed like good advice. And Habits of the Heart seems very, very relevant to the world we're going to be living in 2025.  

Sarah [00:29:36] Yeah, I make it a habit of my heart to do what Hillary Clinton tells me today. That has been my lifetime habit that I don't plan on abandoning any time soon. And this work is really seminal and always sort of paired with de Tocqueville's work because it explores this sort of individualism and community and how they coexist and clash in American life. And I feel like that is what so many of you have articulated since the election. I want to be in my community. I want to fight this individualism and the automatization that we see so much as a result of technology. And so I'm really excited to work through this. I did have one of my former political science professor [inaudible] say you did read Habits of the Heart, at least if you did the assigned reading or at least pieces of it in college. But listen, college education sometimes wasted on the young like you were talking about. You kind of need the life experience to go back and really read it. So I'm excited to explore Habits of the Heart over 2025.  

Beth [00:30:34] I feel confident that you did that reading because you've been talking about individualism and community the entire time that I've known you, so it clearly influenced you. I also like the idea of asking this kind of question with all of you instead of just reading it by myself and doing it in a slow way. I found a lot of benefit in reading a section of this book, kind of marinating on it and then reading another section and really taking our time with it. So I'm looking forward to doing that again. So if you would like to read Habits of the Heart, which I think is going to be an easier, quicker read than Democracy in America, you can join our premium community for that slow read along beginning in January.  

Sarah [00:31:17] We will be back in your ears on Friday with a really fabulous new conversation with Anna Goldfarb of the New York Times on modern friendships. And until then, have the best New Year's available to you.  

[00:31:30] Music Interlude. 

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.  

Beth: Alise Napp is our Managing Director. Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.  

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.  

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