On Despots and Lattes
The protests in Egypt are inspiring. Change really does seem to be in the air. And this time, it’s for real. But it’s all got me thinking, why are there are no such protests in the America? People are struggling. Unemployment is now inching up to ten percent. The poverty rate is near sixteen percent. Meanwhile, profits on Wall Street are near or above where they were two years ago when the markets crashed. Executive pay and bonuses are topping out at millions, if not billions, of dollars. Where’s the outrage?
Reading Alexis de Tocqueville can be instructive. It turns out that the sort of despotism democracy breeds, while of a different sort than what you’ll find under a dictatorship, can mitigate the potential for protest. From a chapter in Democracy in America, entitled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”:
Thus I think that the type of oppression which threatens democracies is different from anything there has ever been in the world before. Our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I have myself vainly searched for a word which will exactly express the whole of the conception I have formed. Such old words as “despotism” and “tyranny” do not fit. The thing is new, and as I cannot find a word for it, I must try to define it.
I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see innumerable multitude of men, alike and unequal, constantly circling around in pursuit of petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, they are near enough, but he does not notice them. He touches them but feels nothing. He exists in and for himself, and though he still may have a family, one can at least say that he has not got a fatherland.
Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principle concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their treatments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thining and all the cares of living?
Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial.
A compelling explanation of our current malaise, I think, but also refreshing when compared to what we find today in Egypt and across the Middle East. Perhaps the people there can help renew in us our own faith in (small “d”) democracy here. One can hope. I do.
