SOFT TYRANNY - A VIEW OF FUTURE AMERICA FROM 1835

A mid 19th century view of our modern bureaucracy and the de-evolution of a Democratric Republic.  Extremely interesting in light of the overly abundant number of rules, laws, regulations, edicts, decrees, that we live under and are added to every year.

 

 

SOFT TYRANNY

by, Paul Greenburg, Arkansas Democratic Gazette

If the Constitution and the Federalist Papers are our secular scriptures, surely it is Tocqueville  (Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville [July 29, 1805-April 16, 1859] French political writer, historian)  who provided our talmud: a compilation of commentary, insight, analysis, anecdote and even prophecy. If he wrote and thought in the early 19th Century, he could see the America of the 20th and 21st coming.

Tocqueville's immediate observations were those of an observant Frenchman touring Jacksonian America in all its uproarious variety. He recorded what he saw with the rare perspective that only distance can lend, and the dispassionate eloquence only a sympathetic foreigner might bring to a still new country.

But he was interested in more than all he found in the present. He was also intrigued in the future of Democracy in America-the title of his compendious two-volume study of this curious new creature in the political and social evolution of homo sapiens: the American.

What shape, he wondered, would tyranny assume when it came to this new, ever-bubbling democracy? Being both a Frenchman seeking refuge from the violent swings of politics in his own country (from autocracy to democracy to terror and back), and a student of classic political theory, he had little doubt that democracy would prove a prelude to tyranny.

He was in doubt only about what shape such a tyranny would take. For in this unique society, surely tyranny, too, would come in a unique form. He saw democracy in America as always teetering between its two desires: liberty and equality. After long deliberation, the answer came to him: In the end, an oppressive equality would triumph. But it would be a velvet-gloved oppression new in the annals of man. He explained how it would work in a chapter entitled

What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.

Tocqueville envisioned a ruling power that would be "absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"

Tocqueville didn't use our contemporary term, the nanny state, but he described it with some precision, and a wry detachment. The soft tyranny he envisioned "covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people . . . . "

"I have always thought," he added, with his usual insight, "that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.''

If you doubt the relevance of Alexis de Tocqueville's dusty old ideas to today's bright, shiny Twittering America, just look around at the web of beneficent regulations we follow from dawn to dusk, and that hovers over us even as we sleep on mattresses with tags we are enjoined not to remove under penalty of law. Or just try to fill out your own income tax form without being shown the way by a certified (public accountant) guide.

Whether by intention, accident or just inertia, the maze of rules and regulations, each with its own extensive bureaucracy to administer it, keeps growing-much like the Internal Revenue Code. And all of it is always For Our Own Good, of course.

Today's example: the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) passed last year in reflexive response to the fear of lead toys out of mainland China, which the law banned. This sloppily drafted law also applies to old children's books because of the lead used in their print. By now the act has had a number of surely unintended consequences. In this case, for libraries, schools, book stores, thrift stores and whoever might deal in old books. Libraries and book-sellers have began sequestering this contraband, now deemed hazardous-and-dangerous to children's health. As well they might, for exposing children to such sources of contamination carries a fine of up to $100,000 and a prison term of up to five years.

An official spokesman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), a Mr. Scott Wolfson, issued a notice/order to school libraries warning that, until further word from the sovereign CPSC, school libraries "should take steps to ensure that the children aren't accessing those books." (We no longer read books, we "access" them, just as events and decisions no longer affect us but "impact" us.)

I thought of the treasured volumes of kids' lit on my shelves at home, the ones I've been saving for my grandchildren. My two sets of the Book of Knowledge are so old that one has a drawing of how the Panama Canal will look once it's completed. Should I lock those forbidden books away, like incriminating evidence?

In the end, shall we have to commit the contents of old books to memory, like the characters in Fahrenheit 451 (by Ray Bradbury), lest the book-burners send them up in flames? Think of the Russian poets in the Soviet era who carried their subversive lines around in their heads-lest the KGB find evidence of thoughtcrime on the premises.

Those who construct Brave New Worlds always begin by erasing the past, for its values must be stamped out, lest the next generation realize that there was once an alternative to the New Order. It is no coincidence that Winston and Julia, the lovers in 1984, rendezvous above an antique shop. Their original sin is to treasure the past. After that, their fate is sealed; it is only a matter of time before the Thought Police burst in. These two subversives must be apprehended. And re-educated. For their own good, of course.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat

If you are interested in reading more Tocqueville:

Tocqueville on line:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/toc_indx.html

His chapter on the soft tyranny:

Chapter VI  WHAT SORT OF DESPOTISM DEMOCRATIC NATIONS HAVE TO FEAR

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm