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Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America with John Wilsey · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: On April 2, 1831, two young French adventurers set sail from France to America.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Their objective?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what one of them, Gustave de Beaumont, wrote to his father in a letter during that month-long voyage.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: He had, after all, plenty of time to think.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: We have ambitious plans.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: We will see America as we survey its prisons.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: We will survey its inhabitants, its cities, its institutions, its moris.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: We will learn how the Republican government works.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: This government is not at all well known in Europe.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't it be good to have a book that gives an accurate notion of the American people, that paints a broad portrait of their history, boldly outlines their character, analyzes their social state, and corrects the many mistaken opinions on this subject.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end, it wasn't Beaumont who wrote the book he described in this letter, but his friend, Alexis de Tocqueville.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Titled Democracy in America, it was published in 1835, which means it is 190 years young this year.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: In his introduction, Tocqueville observed, of all the novel features that drew my attention during my stay in the United States, the most striking was the equality of conditions.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: The profound influence of this fact on social affairs was not difficult to discern.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: It gives a particular direction to public life and a distinctive aspect to laws, new maxims to those who govern, and certain distinctive customs to the governed.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: When I reflected on our own hemisphere, it seemed to me that I detect something analogous to the scene I found in the New World.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: The equality of stations, although not yet at the extreme limits to be found in the United States, is gaining ground every day.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the same movement toward democracy that prevails in American society seemed to me to be rapidly growing in strength.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was then I conceived the idea for this book.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: A great democratic revolution is underway.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone sees it, but not everyone judges it in the same manner.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I am Nadia Williams, and today it is a delight to speak about democracy in America with John Wilsy.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: He is professor of church history and philosophy and the chair of church history and historical theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: He is the author most recently of Religious Freedom, a Conservative Primer, which is one of my favorite books so far this year.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you should pick it up too.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he is also the author of Democracy in America, a new Ubridgment for Students, published in 2016.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So he's obviously the expert to call for this conversation today.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, John, thank you for joining me today.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Naughty.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to be with you for this.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be great.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Looking forward to this.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Been looking forward to it for several weeks now.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Me too.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Especially since I had to read Tocqueville for the first time.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, everybody should read.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Every American should read it.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like making up for gaps in my education.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I want to open with a question about kind of classics more broadly before we get to Tocqueville in particular.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: What is a classic?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is it enough that we're still reading Tocqueville 190 years after he published it?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or what other criteria would you add, especially when we talk about a political work as opposed to say a novel or an epic poem?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: I would say a classic hits on themes that uh speak to the basic features of our human nature.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um Tocqueville's work is a it is the first work of political science.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And his entire study of democracy in America is rooted in uh basic features of human nature that he thought were immutable.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's why he can say um that democracy leads or tends towards despotism, uh in spite of the fact that uh freedom and equality often and can exist together in a democratic society.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Even though that's true, he'll say that people always will prefer equality over liberty, because equality has short-term gains and is is is not you don't need to sacrifice for it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: But but but liberty, you might not see the uh benefits of liberty in your lifetime.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: You might not enjoy those benefits in your lifetime.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um you may have to uh you may have to invest in the development of liberty for the sake of your children and grandchildren while you don't ever while you don't ever see it.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that's an aspect of human nature.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, one of the things that Pope feels very famous for is that he um made a lot of predictions about America and got a lot of things right.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um he got some things wrong too, but he got a lot of things right.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the reasons why I think he got a lot of things right is because he he based so many of his observations on on human nature.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh another thing I think that that uh is is uh definitive of something that we would call a classic would be uh other themes like redemption.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh so a work like The Count of Monte Cristo is a is a is a book about redemption.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: And people still read it today, people still love it today.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's a couple of good movies.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh there's a couple of bad movies, but it it it's it demonstrates the the the appeal that that a work like that still has uh today, even though that world has been gone for over two centuries.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's it's a story of of something that everybody can still relate to.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's part of the longing of the human soul is for redemption, uh, to redeem something good out of something bad, something um life out of death and light out of darkness.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: These are things that everybody it appeals to everybody.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I say a classic appeals to those basic features of human nature that we can all relate to and aspire to and hope for, and and also uh fear and dread as well.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's rich.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's making me think about what irks me about so much of contemporary fiction in particular.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's missing those themes a lot of times.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's true.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: I I I I have to Nadja, I'm gonna say something you're you're gonna really hate.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: And your opinion of me is probably gonna change when I tell you this.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh dear.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't read a lot of fiction.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you are like it's it's like those all those New York New Yorker articles, like men don't read fiction.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I want to read fiction.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I am I am reading The Last of the Mohicans.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Is that does that count?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's definitely fiction.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's a classic.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: I I I do know that people uh don't like James Finimore Cooper for some strange reason.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: I loved him as a kid.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I like Tolkien and C.S.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, come on.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: I I am an evangelical Christian.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: I have to like those people.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: But in terms of being like a connoisseur of uh of fiction, I I'm not one of those people.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: But but I I do enjoy good film.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I I have come to the conclusion, and I tell my children this all the time, and they roll their eyes, that um there haven't been good any good movies made since uh you know the 90s and the early 2000s.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I think it's because um there's there's an obsession with loud music and and lights and and special effects, um, and those things have replaced um those those things that endure a focus on on courage and um and on redemption and uh the the the good the bright sides of human nature as well as the dark sides, those conflicts and those tensions that we all have to live with.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a lot of good films from from years ago that that hit on those things.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: I suspect that's true with fiction too.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words, a classic sometimes I mean, there's something to that cliche that a classic is a book that's over a hundred years old, simply.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what what is it that uh C.S.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis said about uh reading old books, you know, reading old books.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I I often have my my PhD students over to my house for uh to sit around the fire and to uh smoke a pipe and just talk and have have a good time together.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I learned this, uh I learned this tradition from my good friend Chris Armstrong, who was at Wheaton for for a number of years, historian uh of um the uh the awakenings, uh great, great guy, and he got together with some guys, uh some other professors up at Wheaton, and they would uh recite a poem together at every meeting they had.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the poem was uh it went like this.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was uh uh I I have a friend, an honest friend, and honest friends are few.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a pipe of briar, an open fire, and a book that's not too new.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I I said, Chris, you gotta let me steal that.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna I I gotta have that for my for my students that I supervise.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so we we get together and we uh we recite that poem together and we bring something that's over a hundred years old to read.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh people will bring sometimes they'll bring fiction, sometimes they'll bring poetry, sometimes they'll bring um well one one guy brought a newspaper clipping one time that he read from the from uh from from the from uh Vermont in the midst of the second great awakening.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a good time.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a good time.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: If we ever wanted to really like flip this conversation on its end in the future, we should do a series where we just talk about Jane Austen novels.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Since you just said you don't read fiction.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: I know that would be a lot of fun.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I've never read any of her novels.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now my my my my my daughter Caroline loves Jane Austen.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: And she could she could talk with with you about Jane Austen for hours.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's what's so funny because like the stereotypes are that novels are for women and like serious political writing is for men.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I don't know how I feel about this.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's always something to cliches, but there's a reason they exist yet.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I know a lot of men that love Jane Austen.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my colleague Michael Hakin at Southern loved Jane Austen.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he is uh very uh well versed in in her writings.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I mean he's just one person I can think of.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Brad Green is another one of my colleagues here at Southern who loves Jane Austen.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I think that there's probably something to, I mean, a lot of stereotypes are that way for a reason, but um I I think do you think Jane Austen may be picking up a little bit in popularity?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think so, but also it's kind of self-selective because we are in this like evangelical intellectual crowd, homeschoolers and so on, where people appreciate good writing.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we are getting like verging off uh from Tocqueville.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's all actually connected because Tocqueville is an excellent writer, he clearly appreciated just beautiful prose.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: He did.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: He really did.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get to the man himself.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do we absolutely need to know before picking up this book?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like somebody comes to Tocqueville for the first time, what do you want them to know?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Tocqueville was a young man when he came to America.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: He was um he was born in 1805, and he came to America in 1831, 32, as you said in your introduction.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: So he was a man in his 20s.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you hardly can believe that when you read uh volumes one and two, that a man so young uh would would would be this insightful and have such incredible powers of observation and analysis.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then on top of all that, to be able to write so well, um he uh he there there's some there's some things I should say that we must know about him.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: He is, of course, an aristocrat.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh his uh surname was Clarel.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and his of course he's known to us as Alexis de Tocqueville, but that's his uh that's his title.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's not his uh surname.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's his his title from a uh a feudal uh manor that had been passed down through his uh paternal line, going all the way back to the uh 11th century at least.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so we're talking about a famil a family line and a tie to the land that is many centuries old.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's something that we as Americans can't really relate to.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Even if we come from old families and we can trace our lineage back pretty far, we can't trace our lineage back to the same place going back that far.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so he's he's an aristocrat.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: He it's a minor aristocracy.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: He's not uh he wasn't his family, they were not dukes, but they were very important uh landowners that went trace back.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And his his maternal line was also uh a noble line, also.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um the uh Millesser Bay line uh was a long line in the judicial aristocracy, and his father's line was in the military aristocracy.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the first thing.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: So when we see him say, the first thing that struck me about America was it's uh was that equality of conditions defines everything, really.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he's making that comment as an aristocrat.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: He sees everything through that lens of a natural hierarchy that he came from.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Even though you've had the French Revolution come and go by the time he is writing, um, even the French Revolution is as violent as and as radical as it was, and as such a time of upheaval as it was, it doesn't do away with assumptions about human nature, um, that human beings existed in a hierarchy.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so when he comes to America, he sees that there isn't uh as strict a hierarchy.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's still a hierarchy in America, but it's different.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's a different arrangement, and it's built upon different assumptions of human nature than in France.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he's grappling with it.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't recognize it.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: It surprised him.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't expecting it.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he knew that he was gonna come and say he knew that he was gonna see a republic, he knew he was gonna see a federal union, he knew that he was gonna see uh a place that was uh a new civilization that had been um you know uh carved out of the wilderness and taken from the Indians and so forth.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: He knew he was gonna see slavery, um, but but he was surprised by everything that he saw.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: All of his mental picture of what America was gonna be like was sort of sort of shaken when he came here.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: For example, he he believed that he would see the Iroquois Indians and that he would see them in all their glory.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and when he got to America, he saw that they were vagabonds and beggars and drunk, and they were uh, you know, alcoholics, and they were just they were unrecognizable from what he imagined that they were going to be.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um he wasn't he was prepared to see slavery, but he wasn't prepared to see it in its brutality.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um he witnessed uh some of the migrations of the um native peoples across the Mississippi River from the Indian Removal Act.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: He he witnessed their, he watched them, he watched them as they were going across the Mississippi at one point.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he reflected on that.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he so he he was surprised by that.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: He was you read read about that in the longest chapter in either volume, which is the last chapter in volume one on the three races of North America.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh his title.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he has many reflections on how what he said, the the Indians, the blacks, and the whites, how they are getting along and what their prospects are for the future.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And they were not good.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very, it's a very uh disconsolate and sad chapter to read.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: He he is he's he's hopeful about so many things about Americans, but that's one that he wasn't too hopeful about.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um so his aristocratic background is important as we try to understand his his frame of reference, what he's what he what interests him, what strikes him as he writes, um, that perspective that he has that he brings with him is very important.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then of course his friend, uh Gustave de Beaumont, was his uh best friend, his lifelong friend.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: They met in law school, and uh they hatched the idea to come to America together after the July Revolution of 1830, and uh they wanted to kind of get out of France and uh let things kind of calm down.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't sure if that was going to be bloodier than it ended up being.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um and they're both their families had been loyal to the Bourbons, so um they wanted to they did have to sign a loyalty oath, which they both did, but they still wanted to uh get out of the country and let things settle down a little bit.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: So they hatched the idea to go and study prisons in America.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the Ministry of Interior approved their trip, but did not fund them, didn't give them any money.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: Which is a strange thing.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: You have this approval to go, but you gotta pay for it on your pay for it on your out of your own pocket.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: So um Alexis uh family paid for the trip.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: And when they returned, they wrote uh they wrote a report on the prisons, um, which won a cash prize, which covered all the rest of their remaining debts, which was which was really good for them.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And Beaumont wrote most of the most of that, because that was that appeared in 1835, uh, the same year that Democracy, the first volume came out.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh Tookville was hard at work on his first volume.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Beaumont did most of the work on uh on the prison study.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: And Beaumont also wrote a a book, uh, a novel, as it were.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about novels.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he wrote a novel called Marie or Slavery in the United States.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's it's supposed well, that the two of them uh both of them both of them recommended each other's works to their audiences.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And they both said at various points in their writings that they'd hoped that they would be read together as almost as companion pieces.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um but Marie was not translated into English until 1957 or 58, whereas Democracy in America was translated uh immediately.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so people didn't Americans didn't read Marie until until recently.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's a it's a a very um I would say it's a very uh concrete and disturbing window into especially Baltimore, New York City, and then the New York frontier and then the Michigan frontier.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very it's a very striking window into 1831 America.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't have a happy ending, so it's not one that's gonna, you know, be satisfying at the end.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a very important book to read because uh those were Beaumont's impressions.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Beaumont was most struck by the institution of slavery.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: And Tocqueville was struck by it too, but Tocqueville doesn't spend as much time on it as Beaumont did.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say those are some things.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe not everything, but uh those are key things to know.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: I guess let me say one more thing.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's not writing to Americans.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: The audience is not American, the audience is French, Frenchman, his his uh countrymen.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: He wants people to draw lessons in France from Americans who have had a revolution like the French have, but have but have managed to have stability in the wake of that revolution, whereas, of course, in France they were not able to attain that.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: I have a question.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why prisons?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: So their original pretext is we're gonna go to America and we're we're going to study its presence.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: In America, there had been a pretty serious movement in New York and in Pennsylvania for prison reform, uh, which had been um motivated by the Quakers.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: The Quakers came up with this with the penitentiary system.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, penitentiary comes from the root word penitent.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea there was uh was was was was to reform the uh offender by sequestering uh the offender into a cell uh by himself to reflect and to ruminate on on his actions.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in New York, they went to Sing Sing.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and in uh I forget where they went in Pennsylvania.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't, I know they went somewhere in Philadelphia, I can't remember exactly where, but they went to a couple of prisons.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um in New York they had a work program, whereas they didn't have a work program in the in the Pennsylvania prisons.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: So they were sequestered uh and put in cells in New York, but then they also had tasks to do, they had work to do.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um I have not read their report in the prison, so I don't know everything they said about it.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: But prison reform was was rather innovative in America, and the French were interested in in adopting some of those reforms.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um being in prison in the in those days was pretty rough.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh back in those days, you weren't really put into a jail cell um unless you're being held for trial or something like that.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: You you would be uh you would be put to public shame, you know, or you would uh be branded.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or I think you know everybody's been to Williamsburg and you know they take pictures of themselves in the stocks and it's all very cute.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, to be put in the stocks back in those days was not any picnic.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people would throw rotten eggs at you, they'd urinate on you, they would cut you with razor blades, they would stab you with an you know, they would they they could you could do anything you wanted to someone that was in the stocks.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: The whole point was to restrain the person in an uncomfortable position so that the people could walk by and abuse you.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And um so there was a move away from that, both in France and in America.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the French were were curious about how the Americans were faring in their prison reform.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: So they came on this on this official trip to study prisons, but but neither one of them were really all that interested in the prisons.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: That was they both say this, um, they both admit to this freely, that that was an interest of theirs, but their primary interest was the the uh political, social, and economic institutions in the new the new republic after the revolution.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so with this background in mind, walk us through this book kind of like broad brush strokes.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um what should we pay attention to?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: What are the central themes?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, of course, as you as you as you said, the main theme, I got my cat here, is whatn't gonna visit with me.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: I need to get him on out of here.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um let's see.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: So my um my impression has always been, and I've come back to this to make sure that my impression was right, uh, and I think that it is.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: He um he wrote the first volume, it came out in 1835.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um the first volume is much more to a historian's liking, because there's more history and it's also uh more concrete, based on concrete observations of America, with with with it with additional commentary and predictions and prescient observations and things like that.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: But the first volume to me appeals more to a historian, that's always been my impression.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the second volume appeals more to a political uh theorist.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um because very hefty volumes.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: They're both hefty.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're both hefty, and uh the the second volume is more abstract.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it it's not to say that it's completely abstract.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's still a lot of concrete observations that he uses, but um for example, in in volume two, there are a lot of chapter titles that will ask the question either why or how.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a I'm just looking at the table of contents.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: Why, why, why, why, why, how, how, how, how, how.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's um he doesn't really have that in the first volume.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: The the second volume is more intellectual, and the uh first volume is more he's more taken with his observations.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: He begins his first volume with a a geographical tour of North America, which um I think is very helpful to, and I think it's also uh a sign of his times that geography was not a discipline to tocfill that was all its own, or for its own sake, or detached from politics and society and economics and history.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: He he he thought you needed to know the geography before you could really grapple with the with the political and the social situation and the history.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um he he walks us through what he calls the point of departure um for Anglo-American civilization.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the point of departure is the Puritans, um, particularly the Puritans um led by John Winthrop in 1630.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he very early on will define what he means by freedom.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he takes his definitions, takes many of his definitions from Winthrop's observation that freedom is a moral thing.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just political, it's not doing whatever you want.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it it involves uh shared responsibility and shared privileges in a community, a local community.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and for that reason, it's it's uh a deeply moral uh dynamic.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um he he walks us through, spends several several chapters talking about uh the principle of sovereignty.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: He he says that sovereignty is with the people, so he'll say America is a democracy.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's it's a little bit mixed.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's democratic elements, there's there's uh aristocratic elements, there is even monarchical elements, but it is a democracy.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason why it's a democracy is because sovereignty rests with the people.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we see that, of course, in the preamble of the Constitution.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: So when people say, is it is is America a republic?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a democracy?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's a democratic republic, according to Tocqueville.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: But his book, of course, is called Democracy in America.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason why he he stresses that is because of this point.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sovereignty rests with the people.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And democracy, we think about democracy today as being, you know, top down from the federal government reaching down to localities.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: And his observation is no, in America, democracy starts at the bottom.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: It starts in the towns, very small communities, very small local communities, and and democracy works its way up.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and he he calls the townships the school of democracy because it's it's in local townships that people get get to practice and use their political power um in ways that that don't have a lot of consequences.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a lot of room for error, it's very forgiving.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: So you could be the town constable and serve for a year term, and if you're a failure, you can just not do it anymore.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: Go back to your go back to whatever it was you were doing before.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um but but that experience as town constable uh trains you up for higher office and you learn lessons about uh about uh politics and political machinery and can persuading people and and what thing what works and what doesn't work and what what are the local challenges uh that are particularly of interest in your community?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then you take those, say, to your your state capital and the and the general assembly, or then you run for governor, or you become a judge, or then you go to Congress, or then all the way up to the executive branch.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: You always carry with you the lessons that you learned in your local community.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: So in that sense, the township is very important.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: He spends a lot of time talking about the towns.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: He he's a lawyer, so uh he is very interested in the judicial um uh power in the United States.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: He his chapter six is on the judicial power.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: He talks a great deal about juries in in the second chapter, uh the second volume, especially.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: And um he uh uh I I'll just reference that.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: I could go on and on about this, but I I know I don't I don't have all the time in the world.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: He spends a great deal of time talking about the Constitution in chapter eight.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um he talks about freedom of the press, political parties.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um he um I I think the most compelling to me part of volume one is when he gets to uh chapter six on down to chapter 10 of part two, where he talks about the dangers of democracy and how democracy tends towards tyranny throughitarian, uh majoritarianism and and how Americans have been able to uh prevent their democracy from descending into uh despotism and preserve freedom.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And his answer to that is that there are several things.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh religion is at the heart of it.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he'll say that religion is necessary to freedom.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: And religion will have, um, of course, it's there's no established church in America.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: He was surprised by the fact that America that religion flourished so much in America, despite the fact that there was no state church.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: But because there was no state church, religion could flourish in ways that, you know, couldn't it wouldn't work out in in France.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, religion shaped the culture.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, it shaped the mores or the customs.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um Religion shaped the home.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: Religion, religion determined the relationship between the sexes.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he said that women were much more equal in America than they were in France.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: And he said that the reason for that was because women were the guardians of the mores.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the mores came from came from the Bible, reading of the Bible.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he um he also looked at self-interest rightly understood, what he called self-interest rightly understood, or sometimes you see in translations enlightened self-interest.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: Spends a little bit of time talking about it in volume one, spends a lot of time talking about it in volume two.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: But self-interest rightly understood is also informed, not only by pragmatic concerns, but it's also informed by religion.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Voluntary societies uh associating together is motivated by religion.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, freedom of the press is uh there's lots of there's newspapers for everything in America.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: Newspapers uh for any any subject that you might find of interest.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there, there are newspapers.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's newspapers for everything.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um people read the newspapers uh cover to cover, and they especially loved the advertisements.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: They loved to read the commercials in the newspapers.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so religion isn't always the subject of the papers, but because religion is a proclaimed thing, it depends on the spoken and the written word.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Freedom of the press was very important in America.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: In volume two, volume two reads really different, as I said.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: He he he took a longer time to write two.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't think it was deliberate, but I think that it was uh when he when he finished volume one, he got married, and he also ran for the his uh seat in the chamber of deputies, which he won, and he held that seat for uh just over a decade.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: So he was busy.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: His his mother had had died and left him the Tocqueville chateau and the lands and everything.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: So he was managing that.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: His wife was managing the estate as well, and it took him a little bit longer to write.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: He also uh I think that his but one of the reasons why volume two is not as concrete is because time was getting on and he was forgetting things, I think.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um his uh sources that he used, he he would write, he didn't, I mean, he had notes, he had journals, but a lot of what he preserved in his notes were in the form of letters that he wrote to people in France and in England.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then he requested those friends and those correspondents to send him back his letters so that he could have those notes, which was a very unique way of uh of doing things.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he writes uh volume two differently.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: He has two parts in volume one, and they're lengthy, and the chapters are very long, but in volume two, he has four books, um, four separate books in volume two, with chapters that are very short.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um so there's uh dozens of chapters, but the chapters are are relatively short compared to the ones in volume one.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he takes on specific issues uh in politics and society.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: And he also does come back and he returns to some things and wants to talk more uh about things that he introduced.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he'll talk a lot about self-interest, rightly understood.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: He'll talk about the, he'll talk about the relationship of the sexes, he'll talk about um, he'll talk about the mores uh and and drill down into some more specifics about those things in volume two.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about, like he ruminates on revolutions um in in uh book three.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he talks about the army, talks about wars, uh how democratic societies will go to war.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: These are things he doesn't really drill down into in volume one, but he does get into these things in volume two.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: And uh volume two it's um he he he publishes it in 1840, so almost 10 years after he had uh he had made his his journey.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: That that is a uh a very broad uh a very broad treatment.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll just give one commercial.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh Gary Gregg and I, Gary Gregg runs the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, and uh Gary and I did a year-long podcast where we walked through the entirety of Democracy in America in a year.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we had we divided up the the entire work into chunks uh that went for uh I think it was ultimately 15 sections of uh Democracy in America, Volume 1, 2.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the podcast covers all of those 15 or 16 uh sections.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so if anybody wants to go through and you can either read Democracy in America along with that series, or you can just listen to the podcast.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, and it's called Vital Remnants.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll just throw that out there if anybody might be interested.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll um we'll include the link in the show notes.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I'm sorry to just go on and on here, but uh this is great.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is exactly what we need here to kind of get started.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: So one like theme above all others that keeps coming up here is the importance of religion in kind of connecting all of these things.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Does it seem like this was a surprise to Tocqueville?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, he was surprised.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: He was very surprised.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: And um you know, context is is is real important.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um he um of course is coming from a a political and cultural situation where religion is assumed to be uh set up a certain way, have a certain relationship to the state, and have a certain cachet and power in the society.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: When he comes to America, none of that is true.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: None of it is is what he would recognize.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: It is a free-for-all.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um in volume two, he talks about the awakenings that he was witnessing.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's coming in the tail end of the second great awakening.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: And he went to a uh Methodist camp meeting, and he was pretty, he's pretty shocked by what he thought.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um he um he he has some uh yeah, he you can see in his in his in his prose, he's he's stunned by what he saw.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing like that existed in France.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it it it it all tied back, and and so many of the things.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, most of the things that he observes ties back in some way to the first sentence of the introduction, which you read at the beginning of the segment.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: That among all the features of America, the thing that impressed the most was in quality of the quality of conditions.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: And when he says equality, it's real hard, it's real interesting, it's very important for us to understand what he means.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't mean sameness, it's not um, it's not equality quite like the way we think of it now.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: What he stressed with equality was movement, movement up and down a socioeconomic ladder, uh, and movement, physical movement west.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: So you could be born poor and end up rich.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: You could be born on the frontier with nothing and end up president of the United States, like Andrew Jackson, who was president when he came.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he visited Andrew Jackson in the White House and was unimpressed by him.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't, he was not impressed by him.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: He thought he was he was uh a frontier rube.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um nothing compared to John Quincy Adams, who he was he he loved, John Quincy Adams, um, was very impressed by him.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he also is impressed by Sam Houston.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: He met with Sam Houston when Sam Houston was not yet a Texan, he was in Tennessee at the time.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um by the way, I'll I'll say just another plug for another book.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh George Wilson Pearson's book, Tocqueville in America, he wrote that in the 30s, I think 1932 was when he originally wrote it.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: And Johns Hopkins did a reprint of it in 1994 under the title Tocqueville in America.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be called Tocqueville and Beaumont in America.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um that book, I think, is if any if if if if if someone is interested in reading Democracy in America and becoming well versed in it, it's very good to read Will uh George Wilson Pearson's book.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't know about you, but when I first read Democracy in America, I thought, well, where was he when he wrote this?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh at what point was he in his 10-month journey when he wrote the following things or when he was reflecting on these things?
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: What was the context?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Pearson, Pearson does a history of his journey, um, along with he kind of pairs uh some of the things he pairs the journey with his uh with his writing.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's real helpful to read that uh that book.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'd say that book is really indispensable in understanding Tocqueville.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and one of the things that Pearson does that makes the book so good is he uh he walks us through the many, the many people that Tocqueville Met and interviewed and his impressions of people.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like he wasn't that impressed with Jackson, but he loved talking to JQA, for example.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: But back to your original question, he was surprised, he tied it all back to a quality that people in America were not tied to a state church.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't tied to a particular like Catholic tradition or a Lutheran tradition or an Anglican tradition.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: There was a free marketplace of ideas, if you will, in religion.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: Religion was almost like a commodity in America.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a good thing.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, he calls religion the first of American political institutions.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: So he has a high view of religion in America, but he also thinks that Americans are abusive of religion, too.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he was surprised by that.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: And because Americans were very materialistic, uh, they wanted money, they wanted stuff, they wanted to increase their wealth, and they often thought religion was a way to do that.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so so while religion is is a a great benefit to American democracy, it can also be a uh uh it can also contribute to some of the baser instincts, which again goes back to human nature, which uh uh he he's uh very, very insightful on applying human nature to uh uh human activities and human interests.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so how was this received?
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you mentioned earlier he was writing obviously for a French audience, he's writing in French.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yet today um I get the impression that it's Americans who are reading Tocqueville who really, really like him.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um so how was it originally?
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, especially Volume One.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: Volume one made him famous uh in France and and in England and America.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: Americans loved his first volume.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay back then, I I think it's still true that uh Americans loved foreigners that came and wrote books about them.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean who wouldn't?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: Who wouldn't?
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um they took they took his first volume as celebratory of America, even though it's it's not celebratory of America.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: He's not he he is sympathetic to American Americans on the whole, but it is critical.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and when he wrote the first volume, it was immediately translated into English by Henry Reeve, an Englishman, in London.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so it was immediately translated into English, the first volume when it came out.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um he was celebrated uh as uh uh you know an original thinker.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um he was celebrated for being a genius.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um I believe it was John Stuart Mill that called him second Montesquieu, um, something along those lines.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm forgetting the exact reference there.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: But he was, they were uh he was um yeah, he was feeded all over the toast of Europe uh in in 1835.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: And his second volume was was highly anticipated, and of course it took a long time for him to finish the second volume, and it came out and it was also received very well, immediately translated into English, just as the first volume was, and um very well received in the English-speaking world, not so much in the in France.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: He he um he he wrote a work on his political career called Recollections, where he would often he would often talk about America and his experience in America when he was uh a deputy in the chamber of deputies representing his uh his district, the district of Vologna in uh Normandy.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and people just didn't really want to hear it.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they they weren't interested in hearing about America in France anymore.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so he he found that um people weren't really receptive to his ideas any longer once once you got into the 1840s and 1850s.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: He died in 1859.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um but he did continue to return to lessons that he learned in America.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he gave uh one of his more famous speeches was what's known as the right to work speech that he gave in 1848, in the wake of the uh of the revolution in 1848 in France.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: There were two revolutions in 1848.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was I think it was between the two.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: The right to work speech was uh in reference to a proposal on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies to uh uh offer a guaranteed income to the uh the poor of Paris.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he railed against it and said, we can't do this.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is actually a betrayal of the original 1789 revolutionary principles.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he hails this 1789 revolution revolution as like this is what we should aspire to, um, in terms of the uh the period from say the storming of the Bastille to the October days, the original ideas the of the of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and things like that.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: He said it would be a betrayal of the original revolution.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: And we see in America, they don't do that in America.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh as a result, they don't have they don't have poor people in America.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what lessons can we learn from this?
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so the right to work speech is is kind of a a classic uh expression of years of reflection upon his experiences in America, and also an indication of how in France, his native France, his ideas were received.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't received with hostility, but they were not received with enthusiasm, like they were in America and they were in England.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the Civil War, of course, happens in America and people lose interest in Tocqueville.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but but Tocqueville has this explosion, this new resurgence of interest um once the Cold War starts.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um interesting, why?
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because um well it's it sets America apart from the Soviet Union.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: And um Tocqueville makes this really strange uh remark at the very end of volume one.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: Let me just try to find it real quick as we uh Yeah.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: He he makes this striking.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, not surprising remark at the end um about uh about Russia and the United States and how um it it'll be Russia and the United States that will rise up and become the uh the great powers of the United of the world.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: He saw that.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, because there was a very different Russia in his days, of course.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was a very different Russia in those days, of course, yeah.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um I just have to find it.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: I I have a couple of editions, I have a couple of editions that I appeal to.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: Let me go.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: We'll have to edit this part out, I guess.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: No worries.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is the um I usually work off of the uh Liberty Fund edition, which is two volumes.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean just two volumes anyway, but two separate books.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: And this is my old uh everyman's edition, which is uh based on on the original Henry uh Henry Reeve translation.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um but this was the first one that I I read, and so that means that I have lots my original notes uh are in are in this version.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: At least in like Tocqueville, you don't have to write to England to ask people to return their letters.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: So he says there are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: I allude to the Russians and the Americans.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: Both of them have grown up unnoticed, and while the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: But these, that is, America and Russia, are still in the act of growth.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: All the others have stopped or continued to advance with extreme difficulty.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: These alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: The American struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes to him.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: The adversaries of the Russians are men.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: The former combats the wilderness and savage life, the latter, civilization with all its arms.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: The conquests of the American are therefore gained by the plowshare, those of the Russian by the sword.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: The Russian centers all the authority of society in a single arm.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: The principal instrument of the former is freedom, of the latter servitude.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same, yet each of them seems marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he said that in 1835.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: In the Cold War, people were attracted to that.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: And another big reason, and um our our our dear friend uh Tracy McKenzie bears this out in his book, We the Fallen People, which everybody should read.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: I love that book.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um he he got interested in the quote that's attributed to Tocqueville all the time, that you know, America is great because she is good.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: And when she ceases to become, when she ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's another sign of a classic when people start attributing false quotes to you.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and he never said it.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and and so so uh McKinsey, he wants he in his book, he wanted to that was his initial motivation when he wrote the book was to track that down.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was originally uh uttered by Dwight Eisenhower at the end of the 1952 campaign.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: And um that's where it that's where it started.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and with Eisenhower quoting Tocqueville, he he's quoting Tocqueville in the context of the beginning of the Cold War in 1952, right before his electoral victory.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so Tocqueville becomes uh there's something of a of a renaissance of Tocqueville uh interest in America as a result of that.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then I I I never read anything on this, but I've seen references to it.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: But after the fall of the Soviet Union in 19 uh 91, that in the former uh Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, that Tocqueville became very interesting, interesting to people there.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: And um to, you know, as they were coming out of communism and trying to chart their way forward as a result.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: But I've never really read anything that uh substantiates that.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: But I I that's true to life to me anyway.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that's fascinating.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, my family left in 91, so I wouldn't know what happened after.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that might be something you might be interested in tracking down.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that that is fascinating.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so um kind of tying some things together, um, Tocqueville plays a central role in your most recent book, Religious Freedom, a conservative primer.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_00: So um, and we've kind of been dancing around this question, but tie these loose ends for us.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: What does Tocqueville, a French writer, an observer of America from outside, teach us about religious freedom in America?
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: And why should American conservatives today appreciate him?
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, let's let's not dance around the issue anymore.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, let's just tackle it headed on.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yeah, so so I wrote Religious Freedom, a conservative primer, uh, because I was originally struck by his statement that and he makes the statement a couple of times in volume one early on, that he says the spirit of liberty uh is in harmony with the spirit of religion in America.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in France they are in uh they're opposed to one another.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he was curious about that and about how the reasons why that was that that freedom and and and uh religion went together.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: They were complementary in America, but but they were not in in France.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: And um so I wanted to write this book.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's um the the title is uh, I will say, I did not choose the title.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um that the the book is really about conservatism as it relates to religious freedom.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really a book about religious freedom.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: That was my sense reading it too.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's it's not mistitled, but um yeah, but the book is not a treatise on religious freedom.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's really a concrete expression of conservatism through uh through through religious freedom as a lens that Tocqueville sets up the sort of sets the table for in his observation about the spirit of freedom and the spirit of religion.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so I I will I'll in the book I look at conservativism, what is what is it?
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um I try to define it, and um look at conservatism and liberty, conservatism and history, conservatism and the imagination, and conservatism and the nation, and then conservatism and religious freedom is how I end the book.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that I end the book is I I take my cues from Tocqueville as observations that in order to have true freedom, you have to have a um you you you have to give free reign to religion in a society.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's also that not only is that a Tocquevilian observation, it's also a conservative uh sort of canon.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um you don't have to be a Christian to be a conservative at all.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but you at least have to believe in God.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: You have to believe in the transcendent.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: You have to believe that there's something beyond just yourself, that when you die, you're not just going to go into the dirt.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um you'd be hard pressed to find a traditionalist conservative that would be an atheist.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: So there's there's libertarians on the right that are atheists, but there's you'd be hard pressed to find a traditionalist conservative that was just a total atheist.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um lots of lots of conservatives that aren't Christians, but but conservatives generally believe in God.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: And Tocqueville, I think it's reflective of Tocqueville.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Tocqueville was not a particularly devout uh Catholic.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: He he was, of course, reared in a Catholic family.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um he was uh uh he he was married to, you know, Marie uh Motley, who was his wife, was very devoted uh uh to her faith, to the Catholic faith.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: He was he was sort of a what we might call a um uh a cultural Christian.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: You don't do you know something about that?
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um a cultural Catholic.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: He had a great deal of respect for religion.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think he did believe in in basic tenets of uh of Catholicism and of Christianity.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Tocqueville sometimes does get a bad rap for arguing, well, religion is good for a society only for pragmatic reasons.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: But the people don't really have to believe it, they just have to sort of tell each other the Santa Claus stories and wink wink, and as long as they all respect those traditions, everything will be well.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's a sort of a cynical read on Tookville.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: I totally disagree with that.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because Tookville, in his in the long sections in both volumes on religion, he talks about how no Americans believe this.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: They believe uh in the doctrines of Christianity.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: They have a lot of different denominations, and they're not all unified into one sort of doctrine.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but but they have unity of belief, and that's seen in the way that they live their lives, the ethic and the morality that forms the mores.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's how you know that they really believe it.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: You can't be a scoundrel in private and be successful in public.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's a a Christian moral moral moray.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: So if they didn't believe this stuff, then you would see uh a breakdown in the public morality, and you don't in America at that time.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, anyway, I can't really remember what you asked me.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: I just started talking.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, this is wonderful.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was asking, um, so I guess like that final bit like, why should we appreciate American conservatives appreciate him today?
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you're getting to that.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like the whole idea that uh the public and the private are connected.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, like what happens?
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_01: We we should.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: We must care.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: And a key feature of democracy in America is that in it in a for a democracy to tend towards liberty and not towards tyranny, there has to be a balance between the interests of the of the of the individual and the interests of the community.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: And there has to be a balance between the interests of private life and the interests of public life.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: And when you have that balance, um, then you you have the condition set to enjoy liberty.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: When those things are out of balance, then that's where majoritarian tyranny can take over.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is going to be uh, this is really a moral consideration rooted in the Christian ethic.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: Namely, that how do you know if you're free?
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: How do you know that you have freedom?
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you know if you're in a you're a slave or you're in a despotism?
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: If you have responsibility, you know you have freedom.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so when you don't have responsibility for something, you don't have freedom.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the way I I talk to my students about it, let's say you you you have a job at Chick-fil-A, and you you're working at Chick-fil-A, and um you show up for work every day on time, and you wear your uniform and you say my pleasure and everything.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_01: But but your coworkers are late to work.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them come to work and they've been smoking pot.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they don't uh they're not respectful to the customers.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they're stealing money out of the cash register.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: If you're just a if you're an employee, a peer of these of these other employees, is it your responsibility to fire them, to discipline them, to correct them, to dock their pay?
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is that your purview?
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: So that means you don't have the freedom.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're the owner or if you're the manager, you you definitely have the responsibility, and you also have the freedom to do all this thing.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you know if you're free?
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know if you're free if you have responsibility for things.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Toadville says that everybody in America has a little bit of power, a little bit of political power.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_01: Not a lot of power, but they do have a little bit of power.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: And with that power always comes responsibility.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that's rooted in the Christian mores.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_01: If we if we lose sight of these things, if we if we become, if we completely throw ourselves into the secular pot as a nation, um then we will lose our freedom.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because we won't understand how to balance public and private and freedom and responsibility.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: Freedom is not just doing whatever you want.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's anarchy.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's anarchy.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: And in the Western tradition, going it at least as far back as Epictetus, maybe as far back as Plato and Aristotle, that's been universally agreed upon that freedom is not license.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: And um it has to come with uh a duty as well as a privilege.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what's so great about democracy in America, is you see that theme throughout.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's a conservative principle.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: When I say that, it's not like this is our team, we own it.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's conservative in the sense that anybody who's interested in tradition and maintaining and preserving tradition and handing tradition down to our children and grandchildren, that's you're a conservative.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I don't use the term conservativism in a Trumpy or Republican or partisan way.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I really do think that most people in America are at heart conservative.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_01: My dad is a, I don't think he's voted for Republican since um I don't know that he's ever voted for a Republican, actually when I think about it.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: His first election was he inky cast a vote for John F.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_01: Kennedy.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_01: He wouldn't appreciate me dating him like that, but maybe he voted for Nixon in 68.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_01: But um he he is an old school, you know, liberal from like the 60s.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's his politics.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_01: But when I talk to him about not just politics, when I talk to him about family or about um, you know, things that matter, uh he is deeply conservative, even though he's never voted for a Republican.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I mean.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think America is basically a conservative people because we care about our traditions.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_01: And we want to hand down our traditions to our children and our grandchildren.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: We care about what kind of a world they're gonna live in.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're not social Keynesians where we're just gonna spend all the money and let the next generation worry about the consequences.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, those are those are thoughts.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_01: I have a lot of thoughts.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_01: Those are some thoughts.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: No, I appreciate that.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: And these are good thoughts.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I think that's what I enjoyed about your book, that it gets beyond the political, that being a conservative is not necessarily a political stance the way people most readily think, but that it has something to do with how you think about life, how you think about community, family, and the imagination, which I guess brings us back to books.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like what books do you read and what do you think about?
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as we conclude, I do have a final books question for you.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: What classic book, whether fiction or nonfiction, do you wish you had written and why?
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: Do I wish I had written?
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: I have to really think about that, but I'll I'll say this.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh um I first read The Chronicles of Narnia when I was in the third grade.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was an old third grader.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was 10 in third grade.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_01: Don't judge me.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's okay.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: Most people are most people are eight.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was ten.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_00: John, you turned out just fine, so we're not gonna worry about it.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember my our third grade teacher, Miss Stradley.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_01: She uh we read The Line, the Witch in the Wardrobe, and then I read the rest of the series the summer after my third grade year, because it was so blown away by it.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the thing that I remember, my first impressions when I was a 10-year-old reading The Line, the Witch in the Wardrobe is how relatable it was.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um how I guess what it was the the description I'm trying to reach for, it was intuitively relatable.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_01: I could see myself in all of the characters, not as Land, but I could see myself in almost all the characters, somehow.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Either in ways that I wanted to be, or ways that I was and didn't like, or ways that I was and were just neutral.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'd always kind of was worried that I would be, I would end up like Edmund and just be a brat.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_01: But then he comes around and he comes good at the end.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_01: And Edmund was always my favorite character of all, especially in the Voyager to the Dawn Treader.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_01: He was such a he was such a noble heart in Voyager the Dawntreader.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_01: I said, wow, I really want to be like that.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Peter was somebody that I I found the least relatable because he just seemed to always have it together.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then to see Susan and Lucy in their the dynamic of their relationship as sisters, they loved each other, but it was comp it was complicated.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: You could just see these things and they were just they were so concrete.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_01: They were you could see them lived out in your own family or in your own relationships, even as a little kid.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, if you if if there's people that are listening that have never read all of the books, you know, Susan has a sad story at the end.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you read about that and you think, oh, I hope I hope that doesn't happen to me, you know.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think because of its relatability, and because as a child, you can relate to it so so immediately.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_01: And as an adult, you can you can do so there too, but in different ways.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And especially as you grow, and if you've read it more than once over the course of your lifetime, it hits you in a as the kids say, it hits differently later on.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um I would have liked to have written something like that that would be communicable across a wide age range, uh, from a third grader all the way through an old man or an old lady.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I think I'll settle down on that.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_01: There's probably a lot, but I'll settle on on C.S.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much, John.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: This has been a delight.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_01: I wish we could just go on and on.
• 1:12:55
  unknown: I know.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_01: But unfortunately, all good things must come to an end.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.