Project 1835

A Frenchman saw democracy’s vulnerabilities long before Donald Trump began capitalizing on them.

After touring a fledgling United States in the 1830s, a French aristocrat applauded democracy in America but warned that it was vulnerable and identified institutions and customs that protected it.

It is questionable whether Donald Trump or his courtiers ever read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, but they appear to be capitalizing on real or imagined turmoil, rigging or discrediting elections, discouraging debate, controlling information, fomenting hate and promising prosperity in an effort to establish what the visiting Frenchman called a “tyranny of the majority”.

Tocqueville warned that “a very disordered love for order” can encourage citizens to hand over their rights to governments that promise to maintain order and promote economic gains.

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men,” he observed.

Such “democratic despotism”, as Tocqueville called it, can escalate into outright tyranny, he warned.

“The omnipotence of the majority, and the rapid as well as absolute manner in which its decisions are executed in the United States has not only the effect of rendering the law unstable, but it exercises the same influence upon the execution of the law and the conduct of the public administration,” Tocqueville wrote in 1840.

“. . . the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy,” he added.

In one footnote, Tocqueville even offered two early 19th Century examples of the ugly turns that tyranny of the majority can take — a Baltimore mob’s attacks on journalists who opposed the War of 1812 and race riots in Philadelphia.

Many of democracy’s defenses that Tocqueville identified have been co-opted, corrupted or corroded, and the rest are either intimidated or under siege as immoral and un-American.

Long before voters elected a candidate whose Project 2025 playbook included costly tariffs, the elimination of immigrant labor and cuts to government health and nutritional support, Tocqueville argued that people have “little understanding of the way in which the fate of the state can influence his own lot”.

Citizens band together and use their freedom, he argued, when they have control of local affairs. Today, however, local and state governments’ and agencies’ ability to decentralize power has been undercut by the need for local and state governments to rely on federal support for education, infrastructure, public safety, disaster relief and other essential services.

“Now, when the same power is already vested with all the attributes of government, it is highly difficult for it not to try to get into the details of administration” and finds ways to do that.

That was nearly 200 years before the ICE Age, National Guard gardening tours, vaccination relaxation and other innovations began.

The current U.S. Supreme Court, which belatedly upheld Richard Nixon’s claim that “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”, already has failed to be the independent barrier to despotism that Tocqueville hoped it would be.

Similarly, the current Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, intimidated by Trump, is no barrier to despotism, either. The short terms of members of the House of Representatives, now thanks in part to the high Court’s Citizens United decision coupled with the reliance on big money, is what Tocqueville called “a mediocre body of representatives” whose members are unable to act “in accordance to their best judgment, since they must constantly be worrying about public opinion”.

A free press, another barrier to despotism that Tocqueville identified, has been corroded by economic and technological forces that are eliminating local news outlets, rewarding sensationalism, encouraging bias as a way to establish loyal audiences and rendering even the largest and most prestigious news organizations vulnerable to political pressure and outright threats.

Freedom of association, which Tocqueville argued was a means for people to organize themselves and participate in politics, is also under attack. The administration is vowing to crack down on what officials now claim — without a shred of evidence — is a network of leftist organizations that is inciting and funding political violence.

Finally, Tocqueville argued that freedom cannot do without religious faith that counters both government claims of infallibility and the inherent materialism he found in his travels through America. According to the latest Pew Research Center report, though, only 40 percent of all U.S. adults attend religious services of any faith or watch them online or on television at least once a month.

That has benefited Team Trump in two ways, first by weakening a potential source of resistance to actions that violate religious and moral principles and then by amplifying the voices of organizations that promote Christian Nationalism, despite the fact that the term is an oxymoron.

Toqueville did not foresee the extent of the Trump’s efforts to bend democracy to his will, but it is still so prescient that Stephen Miller might have read it:

“Having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded them as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute and uniform rules, which the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break rules, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy; it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Given this danger, the Frenchman almost 200 years ago declared that to prevent the tyranny of the majority from taking root, what he called “the true friends of liberty” must “constantly, stand up and to be ready to prevent the social power from sacrificing lightly the particular rights of some individuals to the general executions of its designs”.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. (Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, trans., ed.; Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000)

ISBN 0226805328

Bierre, James, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, June 19, 2025 https://www.forthewriters.com/post/democracy-in-america-alexis-de-tocqueville