"Pretending It Isn't True Won't Change It"

"Alexis de Tocqueville adds the observation that as a community addresses and corrects for grave systemic injustices over time, the (smaller) ones that (inevitably) remain come to loom ever-larger in the minds of those who suffer them, so that an act or event that would have been considered a relatively minor injustice in the past comes to take on enormous significance in the present."

Damon Linker at The Week argues that "moderation in pursuit of justice is essential."

"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.

"Isn’t That 'Dependence,' Too?"

"Communitarian conservatives (frequently, though not always, traditionalist Catholics; Ross Douthat is a pretty good contemporary example) often criticize libertarian types for complicity in the 'atomized individual' part of the destructive dynamic Nisbet was talking about, or, more practically, for promoting a political message that repels voters who don’t view 'altruism' as immoral or who may anticipate needing external help at some point in life. Indeed, you sometimes get the sense that Randians and 'traditionalists' hate each other more than their common liberal enemy. But if you boil off the philosophy and look at actual public policy issues, you have to wonder if this is often a distinction without a difference."

Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly contrasts individulist and communitarian conservatives.

How Much Money Will It Bring In?

"The contradictions Tocqueville found in Cincinnati fed into his larger conclusions. America, he found, was a nation of paradoxes. It proclaimed that all men were created equal, yet was suffused by racial prejudice. It placed unparalleled faith in the individual yet was conformist and controlled by the majority. It was materialistic yet deeply religious, commercial but puritanical."

David S. Reynolds in The New York Times reviews Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville Discovery of America.