A monument to America’s habits of the heart
A recent Wall Street Journal piece by Jon Hartley makes the case that Alexis de Tocqueville deserves a statue in Washington, D.C. It’s a compelling argument, especially for anyone who cares about federalism and all the habits that make self government possible.
Perhaps the monument and tributes to Tocqueville are already all around us. The name of our publication, American Habits, is itself a nod to his great insight that self-government depends not only on constitutional design, but on the habits, associations, faith, families, and communities that shape a free people.
Plus, Tocqueville was most impressed with the America outside of Washington. Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” endures because it continually returns to the central question of whether a free people can govern themselves.
More from Hartley in the WSJ:
Tocqueville looked at our “habits of the heart,” society’s ingrained cultural norms, moral beliefs, religion, and civic values. He saw the merits of a Constitution that protects individual rights from the tyranny of the majority. He also saw that the engines of American exceptionalism were its vibrant local ecosystems. He was mesmerized by America’s unique genius for association, meaning the tendency of ordinary citizens to band together to build schools and churches and to solve community problems without waiting for a king or a federal bureaucrat.
Those organic community bonds have fractured in our modern era. Since the early 20th century, the administrative state has expanded, attempting to manage local issues from the environment to education. This accumulation of centralized power mirrors the “soft despotism” Tocqueville feared, which reduces an energetic, industrious people into dependents managed by a bureaucratic class that is unaccountable even to the executive. The Supreme Court and the Trump administration have made progress in rolling this back.
— The Federalism Beat