Every great book is a mirror in which the reader sees himself. Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t journey across the United States to write a travelogue—he set out to craft a mirror. He wasn’t interested in landscapes or monuments. He wanted to understand democracy not as an abstract theory but as a living, breathing reality. He wanted to see its people—their passions, their dreams, the way they lived, worked, and shaped their own future. But more than all of that, he wanted them to see themselves.
His concern wasn’t that democracy would collapse overnight in a violent coup. Nor did he fear the rise of radical ideologies, from the left or the right, as much as something far more insidious: the slow suffocation of freedom under layers of bureaucracy, endless rules, the tyranny of the majority, and growing public apathy. He saw it coming. And, in many ways, we’re living it today.
Some call Tocqueville a doomsayer. Others argue he was an optimist who admired America. Both are only half right. He believed that equality—the cement of democracy—would inevitably triumph throughout Christendom. The real question, he thought, was not whether democracy would spread, but whether it could preserve freedom along the way. The great challenge before humanity was to build an ark strong enough to sail the “ocean without shores” of equality. For Tocqueville, freedom was like the younger sibling of equality—more beautiful and good, but more fragile. Something sacred. Something without which Man could not truly be Man.
The Invisible Chains of Soft Despotism
Bit by bit, we’ve grown comfortable letting others make decisions for us. And we tell ourselves it’s fine. Life is exhausting—work, family, responsibilities. And when we do get a moment to breathe, the last thing we want is to wade into the swamp of political arguments and online outrage. Aren’t we exhausted by the constant scandals in the news cycle?
So, we check out. And while we’re watching the Duttons fight for their ranch in Yellowstone (great show, by the way), scrolling on social media, or just trying to get some sleep, something happens. We lose control over our own lives.
Tocqueville had a name for this: soft despotism. It’s not a brutal dictatorship. There are no tanks in the streets, no midnight arrests. It’s worse. It’s a system that lulls us into complacency, convinces us that everything is fine, and keeps us indifferent—until one day, we wake up to find that freedom is a hollow shell.
We still vote, and we still believe that we’re free. But what if that freedom is just an illusion? What if we’re choosing between factions of the same political elite every few years, mistaking the ritual for real self-government? If this sounds familiar, it’s not a coincidence. Tocqueville put it neatly:
The citizens fall under the control of the public administration at every instant; they are carried imperceptibly and as if without their knowledge to sacrifice to the public administration some new parts of their individual independence, and these same men who from time to time overturn a throne and trample kings underfoot, bow more and more, without resistance, to the slightest will of a clerk.
Ouch!
Politics Isn’t a Game You Win—It’s a Conversation That Never Ends
One of Plato’s most significant lessons was that politics is never finished. It’s not a level you clear in a video game and move on. There is no perfect constitution, no final political system where things will run themselves. Everything on Earth is destined to decay and change. That’s what utopians—of all political stripes—always miss. Man will never be able to put his boots up on the desk and simply be. To live is to struggle, to solve problems, to love and hate.
Achilles warned Priam that the best we can hope for was a mix of blessings and miseries—no mortal leaves this world untouched by sorrow. We shouldn’t seek comfort alone, but meaning. And if it’s meaning we want, it is freedom we need. Just like actors need a stage, humans need freedom. Without it, nothing is truly worthwhile.
Politics is a conversation, a daily practice—like love, something that isn’t just achieved once, but must be nurtured and renewed every morning. Some believe we could do without politics; they are wrong. It’s not a task we can outsource. No expert, politician, or clerk can do it for us. Tocqueville hated machines, and politics is no machine. It doesn’t run on autopilot. It’s not a system we can build once and expect to function forever. Freedom demands a particular combative spirit. So please, dear reader—never shut up.
We must reoccupy the public space, not as spectators, but as participants. That means gathering, debating, questioning. It means refusing to let bureaucrats and distant institutions shape our lives without our say. Tocqueville understood this better than anyone. And maybe that’s why, nearly two centuries later, we are still looking into his mirror.
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