A WARNING ABOUT MOB RULE
Why We Need ‘Democracy In America’ More Than Ever
A Frenchman’s great book about the United States still speaks to our times and the presidential election
Democracy in America is one of those Himalayan peaks of literature that, like Middlemarch or War and Peace, you envision as trek you’ll need an oxygen tank to tackle. Once you start it, you see that it’s instead a grand tour led by one of the most elegant minds ever to show you the way.
My first encounter with the book came when I was an undergraduate political science major and a professor assigned an excerpt dealing with its author’s fears that the American form of democracy might lead to a “tyranny of the majority.”
Back then — when everyone took ideals like “the peaceful transfer of power” for granted — Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterwork seemed to have mainly historical interest. Who needed to worry about mob rule when, even at the height of the anti-Vietnam-War protests, people hadn’t smashed the doors of the Capitol but only marched in the streets and occupied buildings on campuses?
Years later, as the book critic for a large newspaper, I read all of Democracy in America and was struck by something else: how easy the book was to read…
