A young French magistrate, Alexis de Tocqueville, extensively toured the brawling and bumptious young United States of America in the early 1830s. His account of what he observed and what he concluded was published simultaneously in French and English as “Democracy in America” in 1835. Tocqueville was fluent in English. His wife was English and English liberties and laws suited him far better than the absolute tyranny which was France at that time. So his English prose is magnificent. His insights are astonishing and prophetic to this day.
By the word ‘Democracy' Tocqueville did not mean to refer to democratic government or voting systems. He meant something much more profound and significant. He meant that the social condition of Americans of that day was in the forefront of what he saw as a centuries long implacable social revolution to abolish all forms of aristocracy and make humans equal to one another socially. Democracy is social equality, levelling. But beware, says Alexis. When everyone is equal and alike they could be masters of themselves, but they are more likely to become "equally the slaves of one man."
In our modern terms, what Tocqueville was talking about was cultural revolution.
America, then, exhibits in her social state a most extraordinary phenomenon. Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance… [In the end they must become equal politically as well]
Now I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one… it would be vain to deny that the social condition which I have been describing is equally liable to each of these consequences.
Just a few years ago I first read Alexis de Tocqueville's last book which he wrote shortly before his death in 1855, "The Old Regime and the Revolution". I was startled to find that the deepest origin of what today we call "Cultural Revolution" was in the mid-1700s in France in the minds of pre-revolutionary philosophers of that day that today we would call Technocrats.
The resemblance between these men's ideas and the Technocrats of today I find chilling, but utterly persuasive. These are excerpts from Tocqueville's Book 3, Chapter 3:
When the French Revolution overthrew civil and religious laws together, the human mind lost its balance. Men knew not where to stop or what measure to observe. There arose a new order of revolutionists, whose boldness was madness, who shrank from no novelty, knew no scruples, listened to no argument or objection….
About the middle of the [18th] century, a class of writers devoted their attention to administrative questions; they had many points in common, and were hence distinguished by the general name of economists or physiocrats...
Their contempt for the past was unbounded. ... they set to work to demand the demolition of every institution, however old and time-honored, which seemed to mar the symmetry of their plans…
To check you: Revolutions, not laws... a new order of revolutionists, whose boldness is madness, who shrink from no novelty, know no scruples, listen to no argument or objection. There they are on the streets of Portland, Seattle, DC, New York City, Minneapolis: the robotic products of public education in "social justice"; a people so badly trained for political action cannot undertake reforms without destroying everything.
And over them all a power even more revolutionary but so remote, so nameless and yet so ever present that "it is therefore very difficult to discover a medium between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one man”
We often hear talk today of “economic inequality”. The super wealthy should be brought down to equality with the rest of us, that’s the implication of that phrase. But where are these super wealthy people? They are images on our screens, we never really contact them. We are a mass society. It is even difficult to find actual political links between people like the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds and ourselves.
What are we, really? We are that mass of humanity all equally the slaves of one man – but these days the "one man” who could theoretically be found and hanged has been replaced by [From Democracy in America]...
Tocqueville’s “Economists”, don’t they bear a striking similarity to the sorts of intellectual activists and social revolutionaries that the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation is gathering and empowering? And what is the agenda of people like this if it isn’t to “equitably” level us all and manage us all, reduce us to the status of digital cyphers? Isn’t that what Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset is all about?
But Alexis did not despair…
These propensities will always manifest themselves, because they originate in the groundwork of society, which will undergo no change: for a long time they will prevent the establishment of any despotism, and they will furnish fresh weapons to each succeeding generation which shall struggle in favor of the liberty of mankind.
Let us then look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart.