Lukacs and Tocqueville on Democratic v. Aristocratic History

The central tension of Marxist history is summed up in a famous passage from the opening lines of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” (I've blogged about 18th Brumaire here and on Gramsci's reading here).

On the one hand, men make their own history. History is the product of human deeds, be they conscious or unconscious. The history of emerging class consciousness is a history of achieving ever more deliberate control over the shape of that history, a deliberate control that will only be fully transparent and voluntary in a society of revolutionary communism. On the other hand, the terms by which men make their history are dictated by inherited material conditions: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Thus Marxists famously claim that history is shaped by laws of evolutionary development.

Georg Lukacs insists that a proper understanding of Marxist history must incorporate these two dimensions—history is the product of human will constrained by structural tendencies bound up with the existing conditions of society.

To take on board only one of these two dimensions—an omnipotent will OR eternal laws—is to think one-sidedly.

Those who believe that history is determined by natural laws (like the overly scientific materialist Marxists) are prone to the dangers of passivity, while those who favor a purely Promethean vision of historical change make the mistake of Great Manism.

In “Class Consciousness” he summarizes the two visions. First, against a vision of history as governed by immutable law:

In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the origin of social institutions. The objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature. History becomes fossilized in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men. On the contrary, men become estranged from this, the true source of historical understanding and cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, people fail to realise “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen, flax, etc” (49 in Livingstone)

So the problem with the law-based theory of history is that it reproduces a mistaken reification. It forgets that what we call “laws” are themselves human creations and are therefore ultimately subject to human control. By forgetting that fact, we transform something WE create into an ALIEN FORCE that constrains us. “Supply and demand” are not laws of the universe, but artifacts of unintentional human construction.

Second, against a vision of history as the putty of omnipotent will:

In the second case, history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied at best in the “spirit of the people” or in “great men.” It can therefore only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organization would be aesthetic, as if it were a piece of art.

Marx transcends these one-sided errors. He shows that history is both created and law-like, subject to the control of human will but characterized by certain structural tendencies.

Lukacs makes this point again in his “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat:”

As a result of its incapacity to understand history, the contemplative attitude of the bourgeoisie became polarized into two extremes: on the one hand, there were the “great individuals” viewed as the autocratic makers of history, on the other hand, there were the “natural laws” of the historical environment. They both turn out to be equally impotent—whether they are separated or working together—when challenged to produce an interpretation of the present in all its radical novelty (158). 

Many socialists—even vulgar Marxists—are too quick to accept a vision of history as governed by natural laws. So doing, they fall into a destructive fatalism. It is critical, therefore, to distinguish “fact” and “tendency” (183). The proletariat, Lukacs argues, is the true revolutionary agent, and as such embodies the dialectical solution to the central problem of German idealism: overcoming the gap between subject and object, between agency and world.

The proletariat consciously makes its own totalizing history, thus combining will and reason, the revolutionary power of the voluntarist agent and the objective reality of a rational order. Lukacs summarizes:

The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realization of the—objective—aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention (149).

Very interesting.

What strikes me as also interesting is the similarity between Lukacs’ diagnosis of the two failed, one-sided visions of history, and the dichotomy Tocqueville offers between democratic and aristocratic history. Tocqueville writes in a chapter of Democracy in America titled “On Certain Tendencies Peculiar to Historians in Democratic Centuries:”

Historians who write in aristocratic centuries generally attribute everything that happens to the will and humor of certain individuals, and they are likely to impute the most important revolutions to the merest of accidents. They shrewdly elucidate the smallest of causes and often fail to notice the greatest (569 in the Goldhammer translation).

This is a mistake akin to Lukacs’ one-sided bourgeois historian who imagines that great men and contingency drive history. Historians in democratic societies, Tocqueville continues, fall into the opposite extreme:

Most of them attribute almost no influence over the destiny of the species to the individual and no influence over the fate of the people to citizens. On the other hand, they ascribe great general causes to the most insignificant particular facts (569).

Like Lukacs, Tocqueville criticizes this deterministic approach to history as yielding a pathetic, helpless passivity:

Thus historians who live in democratic times not only deny certain citizens the power to act on the fate of the people but also deny peoples themselves the ability to shape their own destiny, thereby making them subject to either inflexible providence or a sort of blind fatality. According to such historians, the destiny of every nation is irrevocably fixed by its position, origin, antecedents, and nature, and nothing it does can change that. They see each generation as firmly linked to the preceding one, and in this way they proceed backward in time, from era to era and necessary event to necessary event, all the way back to the origin of the world, forging a long, closely linked chain that encompasses and binds the entire human race (572).

Tocqueville favors the aristocratic history at least as a corrective to democratic passivity: “The historians of Antiquity taught men how to command; today’s historians teach little but how to obey.” (Fair enough, but perhaps Tocqueville's famous proclamations of the "providential fact" of democracy make him a teacher of passivity).

Still, I see plenty of truth in the joint Lukacs-Tocqueville diagnosis. We today are slaves of forces the economists purport to understand: Supply and Demand, Bond Spreads, Gresham’s Law.

On the one hand, shouldn’t we believe—with Marx and Lukacs and Tocqueville’s aristocratic historian—that these economic forces are simply inventions of human institutions? Shouldn’t that imply that we can change them should we so desire?

(I distinctly remember failing to understand in 2008 how the entire global economy could collapse all at once. I recall asking my father, an economist “if everyone is bankrupt, can’t we just reset and start over?” I know that was a stupid question, but I'm not entirely sure why).

Yet at the same time, OF COURSE these laws are real. Even if they aren’t fundamental facts of the universe, they are structural tendencies that OF COURSE constrain what we can and should do. 

Gramsci says something helpful about this. He writes about the problem of economic “laws:” how can we simultaneously recognize their existence AND their contingency? Gramsci writes:

Given these conditions in which classical economics was born, in order to be able to talk about a new science or a new conception of economic science (which is the same thing), it would be necessary to have demonstrated that new relations of forces, new conditions, new premises, have been establishing themselves, in other words, that a new market has been “determined” with a new “automatism” and phenomenism of its own, which present themselves as something “objective”, comparable to the automatism of natural phenomena. Classical economics has given rise to a “critique of political economy” but it does not seem to me that a new science or a new conception of the scientific problem has yet been possible. The “critique” of political economy starts from the concept of the historical character of the “determined market” and of its “automatism”, whereas pure economists conceive of these elements as “eternal” and “natural”; the critique analyses in a realistic way the relations of forces determining the market, it analyses in depth their contradictions, evaluates the possibilities of modification connected with appearance and strengthening of new elements and puts forward the “transitory” and “replaceable” nature of the science being criticized; it studies it as life but also as death and finds at its heart the elements that will dissolve it and supersede it without fail 

...

It is from these considerations that one must start in order to establish what is meant by “regularity”, “law”, “automatism” in historical facts. It is not a question of “discovering” a metaphysical law of “determinism”, or even of establishing a “general” law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. Even the law of large numbers, although very useful as a model of comparison, cannot be assumed as the “law” of historical events (412).

(See here for more on Gramsci’s views of historical materialism and the balance of agency and determinism). Lukacs and Gramsci hope to make sense of a Marxist theory of history that is simultaneously historicist and rational. That is the permanent problem of dialectical history.

But I suppose the niggling fear for the communist (or any generally sane person) is that we have already reached the end of history, and that the structural regularities that govern bourgeois capitalism are, in fact, here to stay. Perhaps calling market forces mere products of reified consciousness will prove hopelessly utopian. Violently breaking things—a practice I oppose—may be the only way to find out. 

"Fractured Republic" Reflections Part Two: A Democratic Solution to a Democratic Problem

This is part two of a three-part review of Yuval Levin's The Fractured Republic. See also the introduction and parts one and three of this review.

Yuval Levin reminds readers that political nostalgia for an era of midcentury national harmony rests on an unproductive impulse to restore a romanticized, imagined past. The underlying forces of social diffusion that have brought about the peculiar historical developments of the past century cannot be undone. And so, in a formulation inspired by James Madison’s famous closing words in Federalist 10, Levin argues that “we must seek diffusing, individualist remedies for the diseases most incident to a diffuse, individualist society.”

This prescription of democratic solutions for democratic problems again reflects Levin’s intellectual debt to Tocqueville’s masterful study of American democracy. But as I suggested in my previous post, I am skeptical that bolstering individual choice can effectively temper the excesses of an atomized democratic culture. Tocqueville too, I suspect, was far more pessimistic about democracy's capacity to regulate democracy than Levin may wish to believe.

To Levin, the “defining feature of twenty-first century America” is our contemporary “bifurcated concentration.” The forces of individualism dissolve mediating bonds across society, while cementing ever-more ossified and separate subcultures. In Levin’s words:

Individualism involves a corrosion of people’s sense of themselves as defined by a variety of strong affiliations and unchosen bonds and its replacement by a sense that all connections are matters of individual choice and preference. It breaks up clusters of people into more isolated individuals held together by more casual affinities and more utilitarian relationships—each bets understood in relation to the needs and wants of the individual.

Like Tocqueville, Levin takes this to be an inescapable development in a democratic social state. Against a long tradition in Western political thought, the two doubt the possibility of a mixed regime that combines aspects of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy to limit the political defects of each. In Tocqueville's words, "What is called mixed government has always seemed to me a chimera. ... in the end one discovers that in every society there is one principle of action that dominates the others." Instead, what is needed is the cultivation of essentially democratic institutions, which can nonetheless be used as if they were aristocratic in tempering the wilder temptations of the demos.

America's distinctive brand of Protestantism, for instance, plays a critical role in preserving freedom in American society. Tocqueville catalogs at length the harsh, invasive laws drawn from Leviticus which structure life in Puritan New England. Yet unlike in Europe (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), religion in America does not derive its power from an external source of authority—an independent papacy, for example. Instead, laws enforcing stringent codes of religious morality are democratically voted on and ratified. Religion both limits and asserts democratic sovereignty.

Alongside religion, juries, voluntary associations, gender norms, and local townships all follow this basic pattern. Rather than checking democracy from outside, they build on democratic first principles to regulate American culture from within.

Such a culture of democratic self-regulation is Levin’s basic diagnosis for American society today. Gone are the days of a unified national culture. Rather than yearn for their return, we should invest in building an even more decentralized society. Individual choice is to be celebrated and expanded, rather than restrained in the interest of conformity and community. Our priority should be “to make the most of the narrowing circles of cohesion and reliance that we now tend to inhabit—not by constructing massive, centralized stores of authority, but by building smaller, decentralized networks of trust.”

But the self-segregation Levin extols is no substitute for community. Replacing unchosen bonds of obligation with custom-designed experiments in living may well deepen the ruthless atomization and the unrelenting worship of the gnostic self that plague contemporary life. A carefully chosen and curated set of Facebook group affiliations cannot compare with the rich, humane bonds of communal life. As Chesterton puts it in a masterful celebration of that which is given, not chosen:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises.

Perhaps, then, what is needed is contradiction within our civic culture. Forthrightly aristocratic institutions—churches, universities, and the like—must regulate democracy not from within, but from without. To adequately check our worst impulses, they must derive their legitimacy precisely from their non-democratic roots. As the Tocqueville of Volume II of Democracy in America and later writings saw, we would do well to abandon our alchemical faith that democratic institutions alone can cure democratic ills.

"Fractured Republic" Reflections Part One: Corporatization and the New Mass Economy

This is part one of a three-part review of Yuval Levin's The Fractured Republic. See also the introduction and parts two and three of this review.

The basic pattern of 20th century American society Yuval Levin describes throughout The Fractured Republic consists in the nation drawing together through the middle of the century, before pulling apart over the last few decades. Levin convincingly shows that this pattern makes sense of developments in virtually every institution of mass social power. See, for instance, the following triplet of graphs:

Yet surprisingly, a brief discussion of unionization notwithstanding, he spends little time considering this model alongside broader developments in the American economy. One gets the impression from Levin’s chapter on the economy that the age of the large, centralized firm is over, and that economic life today is centered around small, diffuse private companies.

Yet Gallup research shows that small business start-ups have been in steep decline over the past forty years, while the share of private sector workers employed in small businesses relative to large businesses continues to fall. And though I don’t have empirical evidence on hand that this is the case, I would conjecture that a great many mom-and-pop stores and restaurants continue to be replaced by ever-expanding industrial chains.

Consider also the rise of national social media networks and technological platforms, which Levin praises as building “inherently narrow and personalized networks” that “build up subcultures rather than a mass culture.” Is that true? Today, a few powerful institutions—Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, etc.—command extraordinary centralizing power. These organizations, largely run by  recent post-pubescents, have control over more of our personal information than any totalitarian secret police ever had over their citizenry. That does not strike me as a platform for decentralization. Moreover, it seems wrong to think that these tech forums promote subcultural differentiation. To the contrary, in giving terrifying force to an amorphous “public opinion,” these institutions may well cement and strengthen the insidious, homogenizing tendencies of mass (progressive) culture.

But setting my tech-ludditry aside and returning to more traditional economic institutions, Tocqueville (following Adam Smith) saw in the modern capitalist division of labor the same dialectical pattern that drives democratic polities from individualistic premises to despotic conclusions. In particular, the logic of economic individualism destroys the rich mediating bonds and institutions that formerly humanized social relations. Industrialization further divides society into two distinct classes, united only through on an abstract collection of faceless, market forces.

Through the division of labor, Tocqueville explains, as the “workman is perfected” in productivity, so too is “the man degraded.” Economic specialization constructs a new class of industrial elites who, shorn of any aristocratic duty to their workers, grow far harsher than the most brutal of feudal masters. Just as with subjects under soft despotism, the workman grows “dependent on masters in general, but not on any master in particular.” Connected only through contractual agreement to exchange labor for wages, the master-worker dynamic is rendered entirely economic: “the former makes no promise to protect, the latter no promise to defend, and neither habit nor duty creates a permanent bond between them.”

Particularly damning, Tocqueville insists, is the farcical equality now said to define the master-servant relationship. In the marketplace, each party is bound only in virtue of its consent, and in the formal eyes of the law, the two are equals. Yet this “imaginary equality” hardens the hatred between master and servant. For in the “privacy of his soul, the master still deems himself superior,” but no longer an aristocratic guardian, he abandons those traditional “protective and benevolent sentiments that grow out of a long period of uncontested power.” The servant too, though as a matter of contract the equal of his master, recognizes himself as the social inferior, and comes to hate his obligations that stem from a “degrading utilitarian reality.”

Ever the hedgehog, Tocqueville provides a discussion of market dynamics tightly consistent with an animating pattern of thought that resonates throughout his work: hyper-individualism and democratic equality lead to the erection of new consolidated powers, embodied both in a distant bureaucratized state and a distant bureaucratized manufacturing aristocracy. Soft despotism and economic consolidation enervate the people, rendering them dependent on a cadre of amorphous, distant elites. As Tocqueville caustically concludes in a passage as prescient as any in the Norman’s oeuvre, “today’s manufacturing aristocracy, having impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in times of crisis and turns them over to public assistance to be fed.”

Has Tocqueville’s prediction come to pass in contemporary American economic life? I’m not entirely sure. But I suspect these descriptions of farcical equality in the face of entrenched inequality and mass dependence on a class of removed corporate executives captures to a large extent the anxiety of Walmart employees and the like. Economic life remains a realm where the dissolution and fracture Levin describes are not clearly apparent. As the logic of corporatization infects an ever broader sphere of social life, economic consolidation, not fragmentation, may well remain the central challenge to be overcome.

Levin of course does not have nothing to say about the risks of economic corporatization. Indeed, his analysis of economic individualism begins from the same point as Tocqueville’s—it is the Smithian division of labor that both perfects the worker and (possibly) degrades the man. Yet here again Levin offers the same prescription that will be critiqued at greater length in my next post: “we must use specialization to fight the negative effects of specialization.”

Levin warns in principle of “gigantism in the economy” which can itself consolidate “power over workers and consumers” and eliminate society’s indispensable mediating institutions. Yet while acknowledging the possibility of the problem, Levin does not take seriously its applicability to American economic life today. I wonder why. Haven’t chain stores that regulate  employees’ lives with rigorously regimented scripts passed far into the realm of consolidated economic gigantism? Shouldn’t conservatives be open to policy prescriptions that substantially restrain the growth of these efficiency-maximizing corporations? What of employee ownership or stock options, reforms that could create an analogue to mediating institutions within the firm? These seem like the sorts of exciting possibilities conservatives should explore.

Levin’s diagnosis of corporate America’s transformation of workers into consumers is also deeply resonant with the Tocquevillian worries described above. He insists that conservatives need economic policies that will “address Americans as workers” once again, rejecting the enervating passivity of consumerism for the energetic activity of dignified work. The worry that Americans have lost their sense of themselves as workers speaks to a dizzying dislocation in economic life. Men who primarily see themselves as workers embody that traditional American ethic of free labor. Consumers, on the other hand, are passive billiard balls, rebounding about an economic system of prices and incentives.

Given that he grasps the Tocquevillian diagnosis, it is disappointing that Levin doesn’t explore new possibilities of what work could look like. Instead of considering the aforementioned potential of greater worker-participation and ownership as is traditionally demanded by a distributist vision of conservative economic reform, Levin returns to expanded choice as the solution.

He explains that the way to transform consumers back into workers is by developing “portable, individualized benefits and rights that are not attached to workplaces in ways that assume long-term employment relationships.” But this seems to me exactly backwards. The problem is not that workers are too bound to employers, it is that workplace relationships have grown into cold, staid bonds of mere legal contract, rather than warm, humane bonds of intimate authority. The prescription is not to further promote the individual’s atomization but to revitalize communal life within the workplace.

To conclude, this post has raised some objections to Levin’s discussion (or rather lack of discussion) about the consolidated nature of contemporary American economic life. I have argued that the chief economic obstacle is not an excess of diffusion but a glut of corporate centralization. And I have suggested that Levin’s philosophical solution does not adequately address the distinctive social difficulties posed by bureaucratized economic gigantism. Instead of emphasizing choice, Levin would do well to consider new imaginative possibilities to promote greater individual identification with and investment in the workplace.

I pick up this line of reasoning—my critique of Levin’s democratic solution to a democratic problem—in my next blog post.

Reviewing Yuval Levin's "The Fractured Republic," an Introduction

This is the introduction to a three-part review of Yuval Levin's The Fractured Republic. See also parts one, two, and three of that review.

I have finally gotten around to reading Yuval Levin’s much heralded study of our present political dislocation and philosophical exposition of a conservative political vision. The book is worth the hype. Combining philosophical insight, empirical breadth, and historical sobriety, Levin well-deserves his reputation as the leading intellectual light of the contemporary Right.

The work can fairly be described as an extended meditation on a basic Tocquevillian insight: individualistic atomism and collectivist consolidation are not antagonistic poles, but are rather twin forces marching always in tandem. As I’ve written about before, philosophical individualism leads to the leveling of intermediary authority and the elevation of a distant bureaucratized state as the sole legitimate epistemic and political authority. Levin’s great contribution is to demonstrate that this dialectical theory is no unfalsifiable pseudo-scientific theory of social change, but is instead the basic underlying logic with which we must understand the homogeneity of mid-20th century America and the cultural chaos of the last four decades:

The transient balance of midcentury was undone not by the nefarious workings of ill-intentioned partisans of one stripe or another, but by the progress of the very forces that—acting on a highly consolidated nation—had brought that balance about to begin with: the forces of individualism, decentralization, deconsolidation, fracture, and diffusion.

Again following Tocqueville, Levin suggests that America’s foundational cultural attachment to individualism cannot be abandoned. Nor can the providential fact of the democratic revolution be undone. Any attempt to restore the nation to a mythologized mid-century moment of unity and consensus as is demanded by our collective political nostalgia would be both politically infeasible and morally undesirable.

Instead, America’s political malignancy demands democratic solutions for characteristically democratic problems. Only by strengthening the salutary aspects of an individualistic culture can we temper the insidious effects of the same. To that end, Levin calls for a modernized ethic of subsidiarity to overcome the alienation of contemporary social life. By strengthening abandoned mediating institutions of civil society and by cultivating subcultures of shared meaning and value, the best of our democratic tradition can check the worst impulses of our democratic culture. Though the forces of individualistic deconsolidation have been “the chief sources of many of our deepest problems in modern America,” they must also be “the sources of solutions and reforms.”

In the following three blog posts I raise objections. Some of these objections reflect genuine disagreement, while others give voice to unresolved questions I have with Levin’s basic thesis. But though I take these objections to be significant, I want to be clear that this book is among the clearest, smartest, most eloquent works of contemporary conservative thinking I have ever read. Once again, the hype is well-deserved.

My first post considers whether Levin’s sociological narrative of American political fracture makes sense of the great economic consolidation we have seen in recent decades. I suggest that Levin is insufficiently bold in challenging the kind of corporatistic gigantism and mass culture that Tocqueville aptly diagnosed as the economic partner of political soft despotism. My second post will ask whether a democratic solution can really resolve our distinctively democratic problems, and whether choice can satisfactorily address our contemporary crises of social diffusion and bifurcation. And my third post will outline longstanding concerns I have with the Benedict Option, which, building off Rod Dreher’s work, serves as the philosophic center of much of Levin’s thought.

Trump, Tocqueville, and the Leveling of America's Mediating Institutions

In the current cover story for The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch—consistently one of the commentariat’s most original voices— diagnoses the causes of America’s “insane” political present. On Rauch’s basic story, contemporary political dysfunction follows from well-intentioned, democratic reforms meant to eliminate corruption, weaken the power of parties, and make the political process more transparent. By undermining the elitist influence formerly wielded by shadowy elites, it was precisely these reforms that have devastated the only institutions capable of rendering coherent the chaos of mass politics:

It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

There is a great deal of truth in Rauch’s account. So much truth, in fact, that the article can fairly be described as a variation on a Tocquevilliean theme. For just as Tocqueville saw 150 years ago (and Montesquieu 150 years before that), the destruction of intermediary institutions is a sure path to political turmoil. But in a sense, Rauch does not go far enough in examining the nature and effects of the decline of American institutional life. His piece emphasizes how electoral and institutional reforms have undermined Congress’s sausage-making ability to reach needed legislative compromises. To that end, he carefully and compellingly describes how weakened national political institutions like parties lost their once sacrosanct power to mediate and moderate the wishes of the many. What Rauch neglects, however, is the hollowing out of American institutions not merely horizontally at the highest levels of national government, but at all levels of contemporary social and political life. It is this hollowing out which has made possible the collapse of once impregnable American institutions, and which must be explained in order to understand the perversity of our political moment. 

Our constitution, both in its parchment barriers and in its unwritten localist premises, has traditionally served to check the more pernicious tendencies of mass politics. In serving as trusted authorities, habituating men in the norms of political self-rule, and limiting the sweeping conflation of the people with the state, institutional life has historically safeguarded the sanity of American politics. As these institutional barriers are swept aside, we not only undermine sorely needed mechanisms of aristocratic lawmaking—the phenomenon Rauch describes—we lay the groundwork for an ever-more empowered, bureaucratized, administrative state. 

But what is it about contemporary American politics that is so inimical to intermediary institutions? To Tocqueville, the explanation lies in the great paradox of democracy, which sees everywhere the twin forces of egalitarian individualism and despotic consolidation march hand in hand. Democratic men are taught from a young age to “despise all outward forms,” and to trust only their own judgment in all things. Thinking themselves inferior to no man, such democrats refuse to accept any external men or institutions as epistemic authorities. As Tocqueville explains, however, the philosophical skepticism in the judgment or authority of any particular man leads Americans irresistibly to place absolute trust in the judgment and authority of all men. From the basic premise that all men are equal in their access to the truth springs a deep faith in the collected judgments of the great mass of mankind:

As citizens become more equal and alike, each individual’s penchant to believe blindly in a certain man or certain class diminishes. The disposition to believe in the mass increases, and the world comes increasingly under the sway of public opinion. … In times of equality, men have no faith in one another because of their similarity, but that same similarity gives them almost unlimited confidence in the judgment of the public, because it seems unlikely to them that, everyone being equally enlightened, truth should not lie with the greater number.

In this respect, the unquestioned authority of majoritarian judgment derives straightforwardly from individualistic and egalitarian moral convictions. The unrelenting logic of such convictions leads not to the sacred defense of each individual’s judgment, but to the ascent of the people—with the definite article­­—as the ultimate source of all power and authority. And where there is a singular people, there is a singular embodiment of popular sovereignty. "L'état c'est moi" becomes the faceless, bureaucratic administrative state, and ultimately, perhaps, "L'état c'est Trump."

Intermediate institutions—or “partial associations” as Rousseau dismisses them—are anywhere and everywhere the enemy of the people. Such institutions introduce hierarchy and order in political life, but are incompatible with the irresistible effort to establish a singular embodiment of popular sovereignty. 

Local political practices, for example, are described by Tocqueville as the indispensable “primary schools” of freedom. Through local political participation the citizen “habituates himself to the forms without which freedom proceeds only through revolutions … gets a taste for order … and finally assembles clear and practical ideas on the nature of his duties as well as the extent of his rights.” This habituation thus tempers the citizens’ otherwise crude, populist impulses, just as our system of political representation was designed to “refine and enlarge the public views.”

Organized religion, too, once played a central role in guiding citizens’ political judgments. In establishing legitimate authorities independent of majoritarian opinion, such religious leaders and institutions were capable of constructively curtailing the celebrity of the vulgar and base. A symptom of the phenomenon termed “Bad Religion” by Ross Douthat, the decline of organized despite persistently high levels of personal theistic belief has led to a whole host of adverse social outcomes. One of those outcomes, as JD Vance points out, is the extraordinary political divergence between observant and non-observant self-described evangelicals. Evangelical populations that regularly attend church were far more likely to support Cruz, while evangelicals who rarely attend church were far more likely to support Trump. If that isn't evidence of the civilizing force of organized religion, I don't know what is.

Robust local government and organized religion are but two of the many intermediary institutions relentlessly swept aside by the democratic and egalitarian leveling of anything that stands between the citizen and the state. This leveling not only lays fertile soil for celebrities-cum demagogues to flourish amidst unchecked national populism, it also aggregates more and more power to an administrative state that speaks merely in the name of the people. The people, no longer to be represented through a diffuse, patchwork set of political and cultural associations, must now be represented intact through the bureaucratized state. In Barney Frank’s immortal words, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” In the new political landscape, there are no mediating institutions of civil society, there is only the individual and the state.

While he recognized the threat of a conventional demagogic tyrant (seen especially in the form of Andrew Jackson), Tocqueville was primarily concerned with a new form of essentially democratic despotism. True self-government requires the active, difficult work of participation channeled by political institutions and civic associational life. Once those mediating institutions are dismantled, however, political rule falls exclusively to a removed, distant, depersonalized state, which purports to rule in the name of the people while stripping them of all real agency:

The sovereign, after taking individuals one by one in his powerful hands and kneading them to his liking, reaches out to embrace society as a whole. Over it he spreads a fine mesh of uniform, minute, and complex rules, through which not even the most original minds and most vigorous souls can poke their heads above the crowd. He does not break men’s wills but softens, bends, and guides them. He seldom forces anyone to act but consistently opposes action. He does not destroy things but prevents them from coming into being. Rather than tyrannize, he inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end he reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as its shepherd.

The state becomes "de jure a subordinate agent but de facto a master."

Rauch’s incisive lament of the loss of power-brokers, political parties, and aristocratic secrecy helpfully points us to the central role mediating institutions play in a free society. But the leveling of such institutions in the name of democratic equality has done far more than render national politics more polarized and dysfunctional. It has inaugurated a new era of democratic despotism perhaps even more insidious than the most dangerous of demagogic tyrannies.