"The tyranny of the majority"

International Herald Tribune – www.iht.com

The tyranny of the majority

by Adam Cohen

MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2006

NEW YORK During the War of 1812, an angry mob smashed the printing presses of a Baltimore newspaper that dared to come out against the war. When the mob surrounded the paper's editors, and the state militia refused to protect them, the journalists were taken to prison for their own protection. That night, the mob broke into the prison, killed one journalist and left the others for dead. When the mob leaders were brought before a jury, they were acquitted.

Alexis de Tocqueville tells this chilling story in "Democracy in America," and warns that the greatest threat the United States faces is the tyranny of the majority. His account of his travels through America in the 1830s is both an appreciation of American democracy, and a cautionary tale about its fragility.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual, has just written "American Vertigo," about his own travels along Tocqueville's route. It is an entertaining trip, as much in the tradition of Jack Kerouac as Tocqueville. His outsider's perspective sometimes lends insight. At other times, it just leads to odd advice.

Unfortunately, Lévy pays little attention to the issue Tocqueville was most intent on: how closely even a thriving democracy like America borders on tyranny. It is a subject that is particularly relevant today, with the president claiming he can wiretap ordinary Americans without a warrant, insisting on his right to imprison without trial anyone he labels an "enemy combatant," and warning critics of the Iraq war against "emboldening" the enemy. Entertaining as Lévy's book is, "Democracy in America" still provides far greater insight into contemporary American democracy.

The book Tocqueville produced - a first volume published in 1835, and a more somber one five years later - is full of keen observations about America. Tocqueville brought to his study of American democracy - which he was transmitting back to Europe, where democracy was on the march - the fear that democracy combined with a strong central power could lead to tyranny.

The Jacksonian Age that Tocqueville was writing about was a very different America, but the concerns Tocqueville raised still resonate. He worried that the state's power would end up concentrated in a single authority, until its citizens were "reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." He feared the majority would trample on minorities, like the mob that attacked the Baltimore editors. And he was concerned about tyranny of opinion, saying he knew of no country with "less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion" than America.

Tocqueville pointed to some bulwarks against tyranny. He was a firm supporter of checks and balances. And he had great hopes for the judiciary. Tocqueville would not be surprised that the Supreme Court has limited the Bush administration's excesses in the war on terror - or that the administration has been eager to nominate justices with an expansive view of presidential power.

Tocqueville would not have been distracted by all the talk that warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detainment of enemy combatants and other civil liberties incursions are serving the cause of freedom. He understood that the newest incarnation of despotism was likely to be ushered in by the "avowed lover of liberty" who is a "hidden servant of tyranny."

Nor, though, would he be likely to despair. Despite his fears, Tocqueville remained nervously optimistic about democracy. He knew that the kind of equality that had taken hold in America could lead to tyranny, but he also believed that it gave people a "taste for free institutions," which would lead them to resist. Equality "insinuates deep into the heart and mind of every man some vague notion and some instinctive inclination toward political freedom," he insisted, "thereby preparing the antidote for the ill which it has produced."