![]() Instead of entering a real-life public square, they drift anonymously into digital spaces where they rarely meet opponents when they do, it is only to vilify them. Instead of participating in civic organizations that give them a sense of community as well as practical experience in tolerance and consensus-building, Americans join internet mobs, in which they are submerged in the logic of the crowd, clicking Like or Share and then moving on. Many modern Americans now seek camaraderie online, in a world defined not by friendship but by anomie and alienation. With the wholesale transfer of so much entertainment, social interaction, education, commerce, and politics from the real world to the virtual world-a process recently accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic-many Americans have come to live in a nightmarish inversion of the Tocquevillian dream, a new sort of wilderness. An internet that promotes democratic values instead of destroying them-that makes conversation better instead of worse-lies within our grasp. As internet platforms allow Americans to experience the world through a lonely, personalized lens, this problem has morphed into something altogether different. Twenty-five years ago, the political scientist Robert Putnam was already describing the decline of what he called “social capital” in the U.S.: the disappearance of clubs and committees, community and solidarity. Some no longer have much experience of associations, in the Tocquevillian sense, either. ![]() Most Americans no longer have much experience of “township” democracy. In the nearly two centuries that have passed since Tocqueville wrote these words, many of those institutions and habits have deteriorated or disappeared. By contrast, Americans worked together: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out and when they have found each other, they unite.” In France, philosophes in grand salons discussed abstract principles of democracy, yet ordinary Frenchmen had no special links to one another. ![]() Tocqueville reckoned that the true success of democracy in America rested not on the grand ideals expressed on public monuments or even in the language of the Constitution, but in these habits and practices. Not only do have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools … Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States. They formed what he called “associations,” the myriad organizations that we now call “civil society,” and they did so everywhere: ![]() Americans were good at democracy because they practiced democracy. He wrote approvingly of American federalism, which “permits the Union to enjoy the power of a great republic and the security of a small one.” He liked the traditions of local democracy too, the “township institutions” that “give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.” Despite the vast empty spaces of their country, Americans met one another, made decisions together, carried out projects together. By contrast, American democracy worked-and he wanted to understand why.įamously, he found many of the answers in state, local, and even neighborhood institutions. His parents had nearly been guillotined during the wave of violence that followed the momentous events of 1789. Tocqueville’s interest in American institutions reflected more than mere curiosity: In his native France, a revolution launched with similarly high ideals about equality and democracy had ended badly.
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