"It Cannot Be Blindly Quoted, as a Visionary Paean to Simple Virtues"

"And yet it's easy to forget that Democracy in America was not written under President Lincoln, but under President Jackson, in the America of the Trail of Tears, and it can only feel strange that a book from this moment in time is the one frequently hailed as capturing some of America's finest characteristics. True, Tocqueville, an abolitionist, both condemned African-American slavery and Native American dispossession, and did so eloquently. Yet his democracy stops long before them, in his elegiac passages of the happy slaves at work in the fields, or in his conviction that 'the Indians will never civilize themselves, or that it will be too late when they may be inclined to make the experiment.' One would happily toil, one would quietly vanish—that was Tocqueville's shrug."

Ben Judah at The American Interest questions blithe understandings of Alexis de Tocqueville.