The Soft Despotism of Low Expectations

I owe John a response to his very savvy account of why it is true that we’re living under Tocqueville’s famous ‘soft despotism’:

I have myself [Tocqueville writes] vainly searched for a word which will exactly express the whole of the conception I have formed. Such old words as ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ do not fit. […] In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, they are near enough, but he does not notice them. He touches them but feels nothing. He exists in and for himself, and though he still may have a family, one can at least say that he has not got a fatherland.

This is a pretty plausible description of American life. (I’d ask if it’s a complete enough description.) Do note that this sounds suspiciously like the hyper-Lockean world of the California marriage cases that Prof. Deneen has just riffed upon. But closer to the point I want to underscore John’s parting shot at my claim that we’re not really living under soft despotism in the way Tocqueville feared most:

This is the face of the great red, white, and blue Leviathan, my friends, and we the tiny bodies that make him up. That he comes across as a lazy and deadbeat dad who does nothing more than send the occasional stimulus check is but an illusion generated by the fact that he has millions of eager minions to do the dirty work for him.

At first, it might seem pretty beleaguered of me to say “Well, what I really meant is that our soft despotism isn’t like the one Tocqueville feared because it’s performing so poorly.” But I think this qualification really has teeth. Immediately after describing the radically Lockean American of the future, Tocqueville describes his-or-her government. Over the people

stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble a parental authority if, father-like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. […] It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?

Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial.

Key to Tocqueville’s argument is that people in an age of equality — a democratic age — “feel the need of guidance” yet “long to stay free. Unable to wipe out these two contradictory instincts, they try to satisfy them both together.” As is sometimes the case, Tocqueville buries one of his most important insights in an appendix note [this one is Appendix Z from Vol II]:

It may easily be foreseen that almost all the able and ambitious men in a democratic country will labor constantly to increase the scope of social power, for they all hope sooner or later to control it themselves. It is a waste of time to demonstrate to such men that extreme centralization may be harmful to the state, for they are centralizing for their own interests.

This is in a nutshell my argument yesterday about how scientific progress emerges from practical pragmatism in a democratic society. It’s crucial because it explains how an individualist society can produce a type of despotic government. Prof. Deneen would have us take little surprise in the way that that government works a despotism of individualism. And that points toward the trouble Tocqueville’s argument encounters. When the government itself is both centralizing itself and enforcing an ideology of individualism, with contract coming to replace all other forms of relationship, it becomes hard for us to stop at Tocqueville’s analysis. If the government itself is exacerbating citizens’ own bad habits of radically Lockean individualist contractarianism, isn’t it undermining its own project of nanny statehood?

Reread Tocqueville’s account of the soft-despotic government and compare it to ours. We might have to rewrite his story to describe

an immense, security-obsessed power which irresponsibly dampens our enjoyment while narrowing our fate. That power is massive but feeble, paralyzed in its own details, sporadic, heavyhanded, and clumsy. It would resemble a parental authority if, father-like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it makes its adults more childlike and its children more like adults. It wants to see the citizens enjoy themselves, but every interaction it shares with them is joyless, unwieldy, and incomplete. […] It spends billions on their security but cannot secure their borders, determines their necessities without ever being able to fulfill them, taxes their pleasures, haunts their principal concerns, lives off of their industry and siphons from their inheritances. How could it ever relieve them from the trouble of thinking or any of the cares of living?

Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice more necessary but more impossible, permits the activity of any will so long as it passes its muster, and little by little encourages each citizen to fall back on his own resources as the public power becomes both taken for granted and inadequate to the satisfaction of the ambitions of man. Equality has prepared men for none of this, predisposing them to endure it without any confidence in its justice or viability.

Our government is very good at trying to be despotic but very bad at being successfully despotic. Our lazy bad habits of corruption and incompetence, our willingness to throw money at a problem instead of reforming it, our impatience, our suspicion that those we pay to be patient can’t come up with workable solutions anyway — all these things produce what Tocqueville might in a way have considered the worst of both worlds: on one side, radically individualist citizens with no confidence in the ability of their government to effectively manage their happiness; on the other, an omni-incompetent bureaucracy of bloat, inefficiency, confusion, coddled stupidity, and redundancy unable to conform its citizens to anything resembling an efficient, clean, smoothly functioning, Eloi-like social order.

Tocqueville was rightly revolted and afraid of Europe’s scientific rationalists, heirs to Saint-Simon who wanted to run nations according to the perfect and infallible laws of the natural sciences. But Tocqueville never could quite explain the way in which bumbling, nervous, striving, egotistical, competetive, unexceptional, flighty, smallminded, everyday Americans could not just produce a class of social scientific-rationalist experts but ensure that they ran the government well. Something about America and Americans — in their strengths and in their weakness — stubbornly frustrates the efficiencies of centralization. Our soft despotism, which surely exists, is yet something different from Tocqueville’s. Ours is a despotism of sloppiness, gigantism, superfluity, and waste, harmless in the short term but unsustainable and fatal in the long term — in short, like a diet of Ultimate Bacon Cheeseburgers. What could be more American than that?

Tocqueville’s dark vision for an America gone wrong is still a utopian vision, and America doesn’t do utopia. Our expectations for government, for politics, science, and perfection, are too low, and they always will be. Tocqueville feared that the soft despotism of high expectations would lead to an end of history that, for us, can never arrive. Too many things are imperfect for us, and too many things always will be, for our history ever to end.

(Photo courtesy of Flickrer Scout Seventeen.)