Richard Reeves, one of our preeminent political writers, decided to retrace de Tocqueville's journey 150 years later. He describes what he found in American Journey. De Tocqueville's [b:Democracy in America|706|The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book)|Jon Stewart|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157224104s/706.jpg|1589081] has been called one of the best, and perhaps the first, modern book on political science - it's also one of the most readable. He and a friend, Beaumont, came to America in 1831 ostensibly to examine the American penal system - that in France being considered archaic and medieval.

America was an exciting place in the 1830's, with expansion across three frontiers: geographical, industrial, and Political. Reform was the byword, and de Tocqueville was struck by the conditions of equality he saw around him. The difference between federal governments in Germany and Switzerland and the United States was that in America the federal government had direct access to the people. It did not have to go through an intermediate level of bureaucracy. He could see already how the power of the purse lead to more and more centralization of power, a trend that Reeves notes has continued without abatement since then. But today power rests less on the people, more on "the businesses who threaten to move out-of-state [or country:]... they have a chokehold on us. We have to do what they want or they'll leave... leaving us to clean up the mess."

Americans have always valued and taught the importance of independence, but freedom with a communal self-interest. So we become "leavers" who, in search of independence, leave what we have in search of something elusively better, but we continue to identify ourselves as part of subgroups with political agendas of self-interest.

Americans' enthusiasm for Freud is a reflection of this self-interest. "What Freud did was to legitimize and eventually institutionalize an emphasis on the individual and self American democracy did just about the same thing. 'It is about themselves that the Americans are excited,' "[said de Tocqueville:] the answers did not come from God or anywhere else, they came from within us.

"Therapy represents antireligion," according to Christopher Lasch, "the hope of achieving the modern equivalent of salvation, 'mental health."' The "born again" movement is another example of this emphasis on individuality - albeit in the opposite direction from Freud -- a direct personal link to God without the church as an intermediary.
The United States was the first to use penitentiaries, i.e., detention, as a punishment for crime. It was an attempt by the Quakers to humanize a system which heretofore detained persons until trial, then punished them with death, banishment, branding, etc. The new prisons placed prisoners in solitary confinement, the theory being that solitude, reflection and Bible reading would be reformative. While intended to be humane, the result, as Charles Dickens was to complain 12 years later, was in many cases insanity. De Tocqueville surprised his hosts by asking to talk with the prisoners. He learned what Dickens was to report, that solitude was an intense form of punishment (unless, of course, one had many children, in which case it came as a blessing.)

De Tocqueville reported that criminals were always caught and confined because everyone conspired to catch them. Reeves notes that today that's laughable. The general feeling is that most criminals never get caught, that most crimes are rarely investigated, and that, if caught, most criminals get off. Rehabilitation was just beginning to be considered a solution at the time of De Tocqueville. Medicine and psychiatry had turned crime into a sickness rather than evil. The pendulum has swung back and the public now demands vengeance and retribution.

Tyranny is tyranny whether it comes from a regent or a majority, and De Tocqueville worried that ,the majority in the United States has immense actual power and the power of opinion which is almost as great.... 'The people is always right' that is the dogma of the republic just as 'the king can do no wrong' is the religion of the monarchic states... what is surely true is that neither the one nor the other is true.... The consequences of this state of affairs are fate-laden and dangerous to the future." We must all rejoice when the Supreme Court protects the rights of the minority.

Minor reformatting 1/15/10

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