From "Democracy in America": "Public Spirit in America"
"But epochs sometimes occur in the life of a nation when the old customs of a people are changed, public morality is destroyed, religious belief shaken, and the spell of tradition broken, while the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect and the civil rights of the community are ill secured or confined within narrow limits. The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them an inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have learned to regard as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise. The country is lost to their senses; they can discover it neither under its own nor under borrowed features, and they retire into a narrow and unenlightened selfishness. They are emancipated from prejudice without having acknowledged the empire of reason; they have neither the instinctive patriotism of a monarchy nor the reflecting patriotism of a republic; but they have stopped between the two in the midst of confusion and distress.
"In this predicament to retreat is impossible, for a people cannot recover the sentiments of their youth any more than a man can return to the innocent tastes of childhood; such things may be regretted, but they cannot be renewed. They must go forward and accelerate the union of private with public interests, since the period of disinterested patriotism is gone by forever.” – Alexis deTocqueville, 1835
Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, the great book for which he rightfully gained fame even in his own time, simultaneously in French and in his own English translation in 1835. It was an instant best seller in America and it had, I believe, an important influence on the events and controversies which led ultimately to the great and terrible Civil War 26 years later in 1861. I believe this because of his penetrating remarks on the problem of slavery in the 1830s and the deeper problem of the Southern Aristocracy and the presence in America’s southern states of a large population of black persons who were property and not citizens in the America of the Andrew Jackson administration (1829 to 1837) which he toured in 1831. Americans of that time turned their eyes away from this deep problem, a terrible problem of national schizophrenia which Jacksonian era Americans could not begin to solve or even to talk freely about amongst themselves.
Tocqueville toured America widely and talked with all classes of Americans from the few rich to the overwhelmingly numerous Americans of middling prosperity, neither poor nor rich but middle class –which in 1831 meant a class of people independent, hard working, patriotic and determined to make their way without help or interference from a federal or state government scarcely evident in daily life.
In the South Tocqueville found the wretched slave population quite as numerous as the middling white farming class and the tiny population of wealthy southern planter aristocrats whose Jeffersonian philosophy of agricultural simplicity contrasted shockingly with the reality they were living. He saw plainly that the slave population was impossible for Americans north or south to assimilate or to remove. He saw clearly what he most decried in the south, the subtle poisonous influence of being slave owners that was already corrupting the white southern aristocrats. He found the politically powerful planter aristocrats to be childish, idle, vain and completely incapable of living in that state of rational realism needed to guide the life of a man or a nation. In 1831 the fears of a slave revolt were much on their minds for very good reasons; not only had there been slave revolts in Georgia and Virginia in recent years but the civil warfare on the island of Hispaniola occasioned by the establishment of Haiti by a successful and extremely bloody slave revolt in 1804 was still going on. My intuition tells me Tocqueville’s best seller describing the intractable slave problem must have reinforced their fears and their alienation from the social democracy of the north which Tocqueville described so well.
In the north Tocqueville found the democracy of New England still zealously maintained by the common man as if the American democratic revolution still burned brightly in every soul. He also found the few wealthy men of New York City who maintained a hypocritical and insincere pretence of loving American democracy while in their private lives behind the doors of their urban mansions loving and longing for European culture, luxury and the government of the wealthy. They were fully as alienated from Jacksonian democracy as the southern planters and fully as in love with European culture but their wealth came from business and commerce that spanned the Atlantic Ocean.
The paragraph from Democracy in America that I quoted was Tocqueville’s description of the troubling social situation he saw in France of his day. But today for us that description applies to us right now. We North Americans living under the government of the United States or the government of Canada are equally disconnected from the traditions of the past and lost to any sense that we have responsibility over our own lives, much less over the life of our nation. We are all being frog marched into a cybernetic, inhuman future we look upon with horror.
The wealthy few of Tocqueville’s day were a society living apart according to the values of their own wealthy dynasties behind the doors of their urban or rural mansions; they pretended to be Americans but really they were anti-Americans. Their descendants have carried into our present day their forebears' alienation from and hatred for the freedoms of the common person. Under the guise of doing us good the aristocrats of our day in the USA and in Canada, the Eurocentric Globalists whose interests and political and social sympathies and controlling wealth still span the Atlantic, are prosecuting a social revolution imposed from above.
Klaus Schwab has told us what this shockingly wealthy class of technocratic trans-humanists intends to do to us. In a handful of years, he wrote, we will be living in his vision of the Great Reset wherein we will “own nothing" and we will “be happy”, as witlessly happy as the corrupt ruling aristocrats of Jacksonian America imagined their black slaves to be.
In 1831 the USA was 26 years away from the Civil War that was to kill almost 1/30th of the US population. Where are we on the social revolutionary scale of history? Look back 20 years and see the beginning of 20 years of global warfare and instability which is still wracking our lives. In 2001 the cities of the USA and Canada had their problems but were recognizably still the peaceful and stable and bustling cities they had been since World War Two ended. Now the cities of the USA are all being murdered by drugs and violence. Far from helping to calm the violence and rid the inner urban communities of the scourge of drug gangs the Democrat mayors and police chiefs and district attorneys who rule LA, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, Minneapolis — almost all the major cities – are actively supporting the crime and profiting from it. Every district attorney of every one of these major cities has been elected in rigged elections by means of George Soros’s money. This is a revolution, it’s a fascist revolution and it’s a global revolution imposed from above.
The means to destroy all the freedoms we took for granted 20 years ago has exploded above us like a nuclear bomb in the short timespan of 11 months. A phoney pandemic has inaugurated a very real tyranny excused by an illegitimate and phoney “State of Health Emergency”. In the name of restoring the state of public health that has never really been threatened by a real epidemic of anything more threatening than the annual flu season, our governments are locking us down and terrorizing us in ways horribly similar to the fascism of prewar Nazi Germany.
What am I talking about? I’m upset this morning to hear that our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, smily and boyish and kindly as he styles himself, is actually as ruthless and arrogant as any crime boss. Yesterday Trudeau’s RCMP security detachment swarmed and beat a reporter on the public sidewalk as Trudeau looked on approvingly. They were too ashamed to arrest their victim; they still have that much left of their probity as police officers. That tattered remnant of restraint seems very insufficient to this formerly free and proud Canadian.
These “body guards” who beat a reporter peacefully standing on the pubic sidewalk are officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, our national police force. Like every RCMP officer they have sworn an oath to protect and defend our democratic Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms it contains. But over the last five years RCMP officers attached as security for Canadian politicians, including Prime Minister Justin “people-kind” Trudeau, have harassed, falsely arrested and ejected from public press conferences and events the reporters from Rebel News and yesterday their practices finally descended into thuggery. Sworn RCMP officers acting like the bully-boys surrounding a drug gangster? What inspired these men? Could it be the many insults Mr smily-face Trudeau has so often shouted at Rebel News reporters? Yep. That’s fascist revolution, Canadian style. Fascism trickles down from the top and corrodes the morality and honour of police officers. How can the trust and affection we had for our RCMP officers be sustained in the face of this shame? And what sort of future does this betoken?