Alexis de Tocqueville: Foreigners Know Best
by Joel Savishinsky

What transcends the modern methods of
numbers, ratios, measures and algorithms
– all the data that daily kills our understanding –
is an older, a wond’rous, a 19th century sort
of looking, the kind which comes with
an unencumbered heart and the outsider’s
stance of bemusement. Sometimes, when
America has needed or wanted to comprehend
itself, it has found that foreigners know best.

His was a fancy name and pedigree,
seemingly alien to democratic bias:
Alexis de Tocqueville, viscount, French,
with a fine cut to his clothes and his prose, but
with a firm devotion to his own nation’s Revolution.
Traveling through the United States, he had
the appetites of a moral enthusiast and marveled
at this country’s mechanics, its manual laborers,
those who would one day be Whitman’s favorites,
those beloved men whose muscles were
even more beautiful than their machines.

Hungry to meet the full range of the new land’s humanity,
de Tocqueville curated the menu of our practical passions:
in his pages, he served up our ethic of endless invention,
of honoring practice more than theory, of doing rather
than being, and of placing our greatest trust
in mistrust itself. Of our everyman, he wryly noted,
“no one could work harder to be happy.”

He heard these values voiced in our caveats,
cadences and cautions, in what he called
“the habits of the heart” – the pulses and
impulses that made democracy possible:
the civic virtues which urged us to forget the past,
seize the prospects that providence provides,
join with our neighbors in benevolent
associations to serve others and
challenge injustice, but never, ever
intrude on another’s sovereignty. And wherever
your restless steps and curiosities take you,
be mindful of our “indefinite perfectibility”
and the warning flag that signals “don’t tread on me.”

Reading him reminds us that in
each generation it is possible, indeed
it is necessary, to see this new land and
its people anew: to recognize, as he did,
our vanity, novelty and naiveté, to guard
against overwrought individualism, our love
of comfort, the tyranny of the majority, and
the assaults that equality makes on liberty.
He urged us to note the dark faces
in our improvisations, the success
of our failures, and this country’s
grand experiments with form, autonomy, and
our ongoing trials and tests of citizenship.

Two centuries on from de Tocqueville’s days
as our student and judge, and blessed with literacy
by the grace of my public schools,
why am I so thrilled that I can now read
a nation’s promise in the list of languages printed on
my city’s white-and-blue ballot boxes,
those sidewalk urns of steel that show
democracy’s “others” where to vote
in Amharic, Chinese, Thai, Spanish, Tagalog,
Japanese, Vietnamese, Khmer, and Korean –
the minorities’ tongues which announce that
one day there may be no majority at all, that
a voice like mine will simply be counted,
as once was de Tocqueville’s, as part of
a many-voiced chorus of gratitude and wonder.


 

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