This is the meaning, for Tocqueville, of free and participatory democratic politics. And it was precisely because he saw Americans living this kind of local and substantive political life, first in their townships and then in their individual states, that Tocqueville came to regard the citizens of the United States as a genuinely free, self-governing people, and not the passive subjects of a distant, bureaucratic, and centralized power.
Speaking of New England townships, Tocqueville wrote, "In that part of the Union, political life was born in the very heart of the townships; one might almost say that in origin each of them was a little independent nation...In all that concerns themselves alone the townships remain independent bodies, and I do not think one could find a single inhabitant of New England who would recognize the right of the government of the state to control matters of purely municipal interest."
These are truly remarkable words for a 21st century American ear. What citizen of New Haven, for example, would now think it preposterous for the state of Connecticut or the federal government to try to regulate his city's internal affairs in significant matters relating to education, public health, standards of public decency, or economic policy? What citizen of Hartford, Concord, or Providence still thinks of their political life and identity as primarily bound up in their town? And who would now regard their town or city as a kind of independent political community whose right to govern its internal affairs in these matters is both substantive and protected? The answer, of course, is "no one today," and yet Tocqueville could write that, in America, where the instinct for independence was especially pronounced, "every village is a sort of republic accustomed to rule itself."
Further highlighting the political distance separating us from earlier Americans is the way in which Tocqueville describes the nature and role of the individual states. Summing up their political status, Tocqueville says succinctly, "In a word, there are twenty-four little sovereign nations who together form the United States." The uniting of these states in the federal, national Union is a secondary political reality to the more substantive political communities of the individual states, which comprise "all the American republics."
Note the use of the plural - the American "republics." Tocqueville frequently employs expressions such as "The American republics have..." instead of "the American republic has" because the individual states are the primary thing, whereas the federal Union is a secondary, and politically less significant, thing. Tocqueville is so struck by the decentralized nature of politics in America that he could write, "If today the sovereignty of the Union was to come into conflict with one of the states, one can readily foresee that it would succumb; I even doubt whether such a struggle would ever be seriously undertaken."
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Tocqueville could make this astounding statement because, for our earlier American brothers and sisters, "interest, custom, and feelings are united in concentrating real political life in the state, and not in the Union," for the latter "is in the peculiar position that it only forms one people in relation to certain aims; for all other purposes it is no such thing."
It is hard to think of a politically more foreign notion to contemporary American experience. Whereas for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson the phrase "my country" referred, respectively, to Massachusetts and Virginia, for us it refers to the Federal Union, with the states being only relatively insignificant municipalities. For this reason, patriotism, as Tocqueville witnessed it in 1831, had a slightly different connotation: "Public spirit in the Union is, in a sense, only a summing up of provincial patriotism. Every citizen of the United States may be said to transfer the concern inspired in him by his little republic into his love of the common motherland. In defending the Union, he is defending the increasing prosperity of his district, the right to direct its affairs." This is of course not a claim about the weakness of earlier American patriotism. Rather, it serves merely to point out that it had a noticeably different connotation.
The stark contrast of this portrait of a local and decentralized democracy to the highly centralized, national regulatory machine in Washington (currently nationalizing major industries, curing all our ills, and giving us "hope") is what suggests to me that perhaps Aristotle's remarks about subtle revolutionary changes in a constitutional order are applicable to us. Tocqueville himself was not unaware of the centralizing drift inherent in democratic peoples whose passion for equality outstrips their love of freedom and thus continually increases the centralization of state power. The problem with such centralization is that it robs people of their freedom, saps them of their capacity for self-rule, and reduces them to passive and needy subjects of a vast bureaucracy.