Democracy in America Today: Tocqueville, Congress, and Decentralized Power

Join host Johnny Burtka with Yuval Levin, Sarah Gustafson, Vincent Munoz, and Sohrab Ahmari for an in-depth conversation about Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and its relevance to contemporary American politics. This roundtable explores Congress and democratic governance, the administrative state, religion in democracy, and the formation of democratic citizens in our modern age.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Why Congress must predominate in a republic
7:22 - Andrew Jackson and the paradox of executive power
20:50 - Who was Alexis de Tocqueville?
27:18 - Tocqueville's reception in America through history
36:14 - The pathologies of democracy and soft despotism
51:37 - The bank war and Hamiltonian vs. Jacksonian visions
1:11:00 - The New Deal, progressivism, and centralized power
1:25:25 - Markets, government, and the problem of centralization
1:29:27 - The democratic soul and forming citizens
1:40:30 - Religion, morality, and American democracy today
1:50:25 - Reforming institutions and educating the next generation

Featured Topics: Tocqueville, Congress, separation of powers, Andrew Jackson, administrative state, progressive era, federalism, subsidiarity, religious liberty, democratic soul, education, virtue ethics, institutional reform, aristocracy vs. democracy

A production of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute | isi.org

ProjectCosmos #Tocqueville #Democracy #Congress #PoliticalPhilosophy #AmericanGovernment #ISI

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Saramab, you recently uh tweeted uh that re revitalizing the legislative branch might be the most important political priority facing America in the 21st century.

SPEAKER_05 0:10

Um and I added that that that, you know, sorry for offering basic you've all live in thought with a capital T.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

Basic but but fundamental uh you've all thought. Um, you know, I'm uh in the at this moment where um we have massive challenges with the administrative state, with political polarization, um with populism uh that are causing challenges to the system. Uh, you know, there have been some on the right and on the left that argued what we actually need is a strong executive to fix this problem. Um and I'm curious uh your thoughts on that and in particular why it's really Congress that needs to be kind of uh revitalized and sort of, if you could talk about kind of the genius of how the founders understood the separation of powers, and then obviously we're gonna talk about Alexis de Toqueville today. So how how this then kind of trickles down.

SPEAKER_04 1:07

You know, for me, this actually begins from a thought that I take to be very Toquillian, which is that when we think about problems in our system of government, we have to think about what we're missing as much as what we have too much of. We have to worry about enervation, right? What is what is enervated? What's creating the vacuum that other forces are rushing in to fill? And when you look at the American constitutional system, the answer to that is plainly Congress. Congress is enervated, but Congress is missing. And Congress has to be the driving force in the politics of a republic. That is just straightforward uh I republican theory of all sorts, right? And James Madison says, Farrell's 51, in a Republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. I I I think the way to read that is not just to say that's what happens in republics, but that a system where the legislature doesn't predominate is not a republican form of government. And so the solution to our problem can't really be to lean into the problem. It has to be to push back. What we're missing when we miss Congress, again, I think very much following in in Tocqueville's wake of thinking, is we're missing a mode of citizen engagement that is representative on the one hand, but also allows for negotiation among the factions in society on the other. That's what you need to sustain a free society. And so I don't think that that further leaning into presidentialism can be a solution to the problem we have. Congress has to be reawakened so that the system can find its balance again. Aaron Ross Powell And were there times obviously the progressive era was a time where this shift in balance moved to the executive Yeah, and look, I I think in some ways we're seeing a revival of a certain kind of progressive mistake about the American system. The idea that the president can embody the will of the society and that ultimately we need some combination of technocratic oligarchy with extreme re uh uh democratic populism. Well, that is progressivism. And I think what you need instead is a way to find a balance between those two, to allow the democratic energies of the society to flow while also balancing them with certain kinds of institutional discipline. Either one by itself goes in the wrong direction. Democratic energy by itself leads us toward a kind of tyranny of the majority. Institutional discipline by itself really does point to oligarchy. I mean, that is that's what it is. And so I think we see both of these problems very much alive in our society. Our populism is answering real problems. It it's raising real concerns that have to be taken seriously, but they have to be taken seriously by the American system. And that means that we do need a reawakening of constitutionalism. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 3:54

Is it um Congress must predominate in a republic because that's the only way that we, the people, actually government.

SPEAKER_04 4:06

I think there's two things to it. On the one hand, the the legislature is representative, and if this is a democratic republic, then our government has to be representative. It has to somehow speak for our concerns. On the other hand, the way in which the legislature represents is by facilitating negotiation that couldn't happen among the people themselves, right? Our society couldn't just fall into negotiations among its factions, but a legislature is organized and structured to allow that to happen. Where the executive is not. The executive is one person. One person can't negotiate on behalf of the society. I think we're very much inclined to this mistake, we all do this, to think that, well, the president is a representative, right? The president is elected by the entire nation. But one person can't really be representative of an immensely diverse society. Representation can only happen in a plural institution. The president is elected to be accountable, but I don't think the framers of the Constitution expected the president to be representative. That really is the job of Congress.

SPEAKER_03 5:06

Aaron Powell And so you put federalism would be a uh another component of this? Absolutely. Just so uh the people can government.

SPEAKER_04 5:13

An absolutely central component by the same logic, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_05 5:16

Aaron Ross Powell I want to concretize what uh you've all just said in a contemporary example, um, and and to explain what prompted my uh that tweet that's that that that in turn prompted our discussion here, which is it was actually the tariff issue, right? I so I I don't want to get into the substance of whether tariffs are good or how to use them or whatever, but um obviously the present tariffs failed at the Supreme Court. Um and I gotta say, I was telling my friends in the administration around Liberation Day, like I'm I've happened to be uh uh an industrial protectionist. I think that project has deep, deep roots in the American tradition, going back to Hamilton. Um but you know, it would have been better if that procedurally this was done through Congress because it first of all it's durable and it has this kind of push and counter push of power and countervailing power that can happen in the legislature. The in the the agricultural sector can come in and voice its objection objections. Since the 19th century, American farmers have been opposed to tariffs, whereas, of course, manufacturing is for it. And that in that process of sausage making, and and Yuvol's right, that can't happen within the soul of one man, however uh uh kind of a pop of a popular and populist figure he might be. But I want to introduce a wrinkle. It's a it's I'm gonna open a box and maybe it'll be easily closed or maybe not. Uh that has to do with the text and it and its context. The text theme. Of democracy in America. Um, which is that at the time that Tuckville was traveling around America and making his observations, it was actually the the rise of uh amid the rise of a very, very powerful executive, namely Andrew Jackson, um, who wielded the veto power like no predecessor ever had. Who, you know, and his own he gave a farewell address which no predecessor had, and I'm saying that's a symbolic index of how he saw himself and how his the Jacksonians saw him. Um he saw himself as a kind of second George Washington, um, the first populist founder of the Democratic Party as the party of the what used to be called the the democracy. And so in i and in some ways he uses this immense power for the first time in a robust way. For me, I think the emblematic case is the is the destruction of the second bank of the United States. He does it in a way because he wants to return power to local or state banks at the time, right? The pet banks they used to be called. So there's this kind of paradox of J Jackson coming strong executive. He's like the uh a a almost ghostly figure in the book, right? He does he's not he's not that present. And and and as he at various points, uh Tuckville says, well, it's interesting that uh I don't think presidential power will ever it will ever increase dramatically. And I'm worried about um actually too much you know decentralization. But in a way, Jackson was um you know the spoil system, this kind of uh a real sense of we have parties, I think begins with Jackson. Um but mainly, I mean I just it it's in it's interesting. I think the roots maybe of a strong presidency go back behind the progressive era, I would say to maybe the Jacksonians.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

And Sarah, maybe um we can come back to Jackson in a second. Maybe you could set the stage a bit, given that you're a Tocqueville scholar, about you know, who is Alexis De Tocqueville, what prompted him to come to America, and what what was he encountering here? We hope you're enjoying Project Cosmos, conversations on the future of civilization. If you'd like more content like this, please like and subscribe, or sign up for our newsletter, the Intercollegiate Review, in the comments section. Who is Alexis De Tocqueville? What prompted him to come to America and what what was he encountering here?

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Sure. Well, just quickly on the Andrew Jackson point, I think, you know, of the people Tocqueville meets or observes very closely, is John Quincy Adams, right, representative of a certain New England type, right? There's Charles Carroll, the last uh, you know, signer of the Declaration of Independence, also representative of a particular, at that point, Southern aristocratic type, right? Um he didn't get to meet James Madison. This could have happened, right? It was a narrow miss. It's a great, great shame for those of us who would have liked to have uh seen the results of that conversation. Um and so I think you can you can think about the questions that Tocqueville travels back to France with being, which type will America come to resemble, right? Um now Tocqueville is one of the few, one of arguably two thinkers that the American political tradition shares with the French political tradition, the other being Montesquieu, right? But you're hard-pressed to find a college student or a high school student who has read some Montesquieu, right? Um it's much easier to find someone who's read some Tocqueville, a chapter or two. Maybe not the entirety of this big book, but a chapter or two. And so that makes him, I think, rather um rather distinctive. Um he's also one of these figures who um positions himself, I think, fairly between worlds, right? So among Tocqueville scholarship, we have all these strange ways to describe him like a strange liberal or an aristocratic liberal, or there's a famous book, uh, Between Two Worlds, right? And so he's poised really at the edge of aristocracy and at the beginning of democracy and trying to make sense of this. And that makes him a wonderful teaching tool with students because he can see both clearly and teach you to walk through thinking philosophically about political and ordinary life. And observe how, you know, as as Lawler used to say, things are always getting better and worse at the same time, right? Um, just quickly on his biography. So he's born in 1805, dies in 1859. Um what I like to emphasize to students is how short a life that is compared to his peer group, right? John Henry Newman is born in 1801, dies in 1890. Mill is born a few years after Tocqueville, dies in the 1870s. Marx is born in 1818, dies in the 1880s. Leo the 13th is born in 1810, lives into the 20th century, right? And so there's a lot of Tocqueville that had he lived longer, we would have been able to read and think through and appreciate, but his life is cut short. So we don't know what he would have had to say about Lincoln or the Civil War or Vatican I or the Paris Commune, all these things. Um he's born into Napoleonic France to a Norman family. Um his great-grandfather was uh uh an Enlightenment-era reformer, an aristocrat, who famously came out of retirement to defend Louis XVI when he was on trial for his life. And as a result, many of Tocqueville's family lost their heads. Uh, his parents only narrowly escaped being executed, um, and that was because Robespierre got executed before them. And so this was the backdrop against which Tocqueville was growing up. He eventually becomes a lawyer, moves to Versailles and Paris, um, and spends time, becomes more of a uh a liberal as opposed to his family being much more conservative and monarchist. Um travels to America in uh the wake of the July monarchy, the revolution of 1830, which he later wrote was a pretext for getting out of France and thinking broadly about politics. I mean, he really had big political ambitions, right, as a young man, as a 20, 25, 26-year-old. So he travels the United States for about nine months and you know, arrives in New York, goes up through Michigan, Boston, Baltimore, out west, through Ohio, down the Mississippi, and then back up to D.C. and then has to go back home. Um, publishes volume one of Democracy in America in 1835, volume two in 1840, spends the next many years as a politician, right? So Dan Mahoney describes him as a thinker statesman, as opposed to a Churchill or a Lincoln who would be a statesman thinker, right? Um ends up serving briefly in the government uh that's produced by the 1848 revolution, Napoleon III comes in, overturns everything again, and Toeffel returns to his his study, which is where we get the ancien regime and the revolution, and then he dies a few years later. So a rich life, but a relatively short life compared to some of his peers. Um maybe that's a good jumping off point for you.

SPEAKER_02 13:54

Well, what was the reception of democracy in America in America, I guess historically, over since it over the last 200 years, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Aaron Powell I mean really well, so so volume one generally was a success just about everywhere. And I think we see his we we see in in in the introduction his intuition that everyone will like it because he says he wants to see further than the parties, right? So he has this intuition that uh Democrats will pick it up, anti-Democrats will pick it up, right? Everyone will find something to glom onto in volume one. Volume two is much less much less well received initially. Uh in part because people who are pro-democracy find less in it to support their cause. Right, exactly. And um and that's something John Stuart Mill actually notices. He's he says, you know, volume two is much more philosophical as opposed to sociological. It'll make it harder for people to understand, and um, but it's actually, you know, the from Mill's point of view, the better of the two volumes.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

And was it taken up sort of right away, or did what at what point in America were people really engaging?

SPEAKER_00 14:59

I mean, um I'd say I'd say consistently there's a a revival in the 20th century, um, and that's due both to what's happening in kind of American academia but also French academia. There's a kind of revival happening in both places.

SPEAKER_05 15:13

Aaron Powell What specific era do you see it becoming a touchstone text?

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Um I think that's really kind of consolidated in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, right? So that's I think your first real um I mean it's it's there throughout, right? Um but you have this sort of first neo-Tokvillian movement really happening with Nisbet and and Bella and all these authors who are who are picking him up and running with him in order to explain what they feel has gone wrong, um, but also to defend what they think needs defending against the Soviet order, et cetera, et cetera.

SPEAKER_04 15:49

So it becomes known. You know, by the middle of the 1950s, Eisenhower's speechwriters are making things up and attributing them to Alexis de Tocqueville. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It's a very good thing.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

That's really a sign that he's become a it's a great American tradition to misquote Tocqueville. Trevor Burrus, oh yes.

SPEAKER_02 16:02

Phil, what's sort of the relationship of Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America to the sort of the Straussian kind of tradition of you know political philosophy?

SPEAKER_03 16:13

Aaron Ross Powell Well, that's a big question, and I'm still shaking in my boots when I I've only learned that Tocqueville died when he was 54. So it's greatly concerning to me. I mean uh you ask a big question about Tocqueville in the Stratian Straussian um thinking as if there's one sort of Straussian approach to things. But um let me just say for me, Tocqueville is actually what made me a conservative. And I think Tocqueville, the the second half, the more philosophical part, the dark part, um shows one of the pathologies of democracy. Maybe I can address your question this. Uh Montesquieu, Aristotle, every uh great political thinker says every regime has its own pathologies. Um monarchy, the monarch becomes too prideful, becomes too tyrannical, um, the oligarchy becomes too corrupt, the the wealthy. What are the pathologies of democracy? And I think Tocqueville explains those as well, if not better, than any thinker. And he saw very clearly how I I mean, I remember reading for the first time and thinking, how did this man in the 19th century know what was going to happen in 20th century America and predict it so well on centralization and soft despotism? Uh that's the part that made me uh a conservative. So in the tradition of political thought, I think Tocqueville is a sort of Aristotelian or Montescuian political theorist or political scientist, and he tries to explain to us the pathologies that democracy he's in favor of democracy, I think. But if you want a democracy to be good, these are the things you have to worry about. Right. Just one other point, you know, Herbert Hoover gives a speech in Madison Square Garden, I think it's October um 1932. So he's running against FDR. FDR has given his Commonwealth Club address outlining the New Deal. And Herbert Hoover, and I have no idea if he read Tocqueville, says um uh the proposed New Deal will destroy the American way of life. The self-government of the people outside of the government. And I've always thought that I mean that is such a Tocqueville theme. And who and Hoover saw it all. Um but I I don't know if he read Tocqueville. I uh, you know, maybe in the 1950s he would have quoted Tocqueville. Um but but I think he must have.

SPEAKER_04 18:53

I think that that's that sense that he illuminates something that sort of brings you into the deeper paths of conservatism was very true for me too. And I I it I i it it was striking to me in first I I sort of first read Tocqueville as an undergrad, but really I wrestled with him as a graduate student. I had a wonderful course at the University of Chicago with Ralph Lerner, where we actually read the the Mansfield translation as the first people to read it. It hadn't been published yet, and he he he asked as a favor that we would find typos and things. Um and what what really struck me in that reading of it was the way in which here was a uh a kind of conservative friend of the liberal society who was worried about the right things. He was a he was a a liberal, uh but not in the not in the way in which liberalism usually described itself. Uh he wasn't interested in the Lockean uh thought experiments. That's not what he was really doing. In fact, the book begins with an introduction that gives you a kind of thousand-year history of liberalism that doesn't even notice the Enlightenment. It's it actually is not that story at all. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

The declaration is missing in the text.

SPEAKER_04 20:08

And it's not bad. It begins instead from Christianity, really, and from the from the conviction that uh that human beings are equal, which he takes to be much more deeply rooted than w we sometimes imagine. And from that works out the way in which a politics rooted in a commitment to equality has enormous promise, but also enormous challenges and risks. Um and that depth of understanding, which I agree is very Aristotelian. Toqueville is very Aristotelian. Um he's like Burke in this sense. He doesn't really talk about Aristotle very much, but there's just no question that his mind was shaped by s Aristotle's sense of what the human person is and what politics is for, and to apply that in such a deep way to really modern problems, I think is where that secret comes from, where you read it with students today and they think, well, this is happening. And you ask them, well, he said this in 1830, so how do we what do we make of that? Uh did was it happening then? Did he foresee it? Is there just a type of person that always thinks this is happening, which is kind of my worry, frankly, that this is just what I, you know, w w in every generation this is how conservatives worry about liberalism. Um but it's it's all there in a very profound way that's not only political and institutional, but really digs deep into the human soul to find the sources of these problems, which is ultimately where they are.

SPEAKER_00 21:31

Uh that I think ser takes very seriously um the relationship between, I mean, we we you know mores, right? But custom broadly and law, right? To the to your point about the self-government self-governing needs to happen not just through political institutions, right? And sometimes when I um teach Tocqueville on you know the habits of the heart and mores, I will pair it with um a section from the Summa, which is my favorite question from the Summa on The relationship between custom and law, right? That custom is the context in which law is developed, custom uh is the light in which we interpret law, it can undermine law, it can resist law, all these sorts of things. And I think Tocqueville is interested in asking certain questions along those same lines, right? That if we are to have a self-governing society that has a limited government, right, what other kinds of self-government do there need to be in order to make that flourish and thrive.

SPEAKER_05 22:32

There's a this cut remark I think will dovetail with what everyone has said. Um but there's a a passage, there's a point where he describes um this capacity for self-government outside formal state authority, where he says, if there is an obstruction or a hindrance upon a road, you'll see Americans gathering in assembly and sort of figuring out, and then some uh some person is appointed as a kind of assembly foreman and they decide and they they fix it before anyone even thinks to reach to to reach out to whatever state authority might have existed in that in that location. So I think still some nearly two centuries later, um, that that's still there's elements of that in American behavior. Um but, and I want to introduce some wrinkles here, already in the 19th century that capacity was under threat because you have, and I think this is a tension that runs through the book. It's the tension between the Hamiltonian state that wants to weave together a national market. And that means, of course, bank, and the bank war is in there, and I mentioned it, we can get into it. I I find it a very fast, a very, very interesting episode, which could still it could be a problem of 2026, too. Not the bank itself, but the shape of this, the structural shape of the problem. Um so the Hamiltonian state is ultimately a centralizing state. Bank canal credit system, uh, tariff, and then you have democracy, and this is a i you can read this in Tuckville, and then there are historians that that I think make this point explicitly, rising in a way in reaction against this market state, this large centralized national market state. And you could read the whiskey rebellion in that light, you can read um these various debtors uprisings in the West, places like Kentucky that were precursors of Jacksonianism, where the uh you know the entire different court system was set up to basically nullify old debts, notwithstanding the Constitution's prohibitions against uh against government doing that. Um and then you of especially in Jacksonism itself. You see, again, it's a it's the rebellion uh, in a way it's a rebellion of small against the uh the the central or the local against the central, and he frames it that way. But you can also uh frame it as a rebellion of of a kind of anti-market small D democracy, uh uh is in there, by one reading at least. Um And the problems are still here, right? The problem of a of a large Hamiltonian state when it in in infringes upon um that capacity of people to do things for themselves, but that big state was also necessary for us to have a national market, and it's it's not easy to resolve. And at various points, I think he comes down in different directions about how the the problem. I don't think there is a uh uh, to me at least, a unified voice about in through Tocqueville about how to how to come to terms with this problem of the Hamiltonian state versus local democratic reaction.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

Aaron Ross Powell, sort of the uh democratic rebellion, how much of that endured versus how much of that um was then sort of uh overtaken by in the Gilded Age, kind of the industrialization and all that.

SPEAKER_05 26:12

Aaron Powell So in terms of so the bank the the bank the solution of the of the of the democracy to this institution which was doing important things. The Second Bank of the United States was ensuring a responsible flow of credit, but also disciplining credit. Um it was a very useful institution. Um however, it was also, as the Jacksonians complained, and I don't think they were wrong, it was also a kind of vehicle for the Northeastern commercial establishment, for the for the very rich planter class of the South, and for uh um uh manufacturers in the in the Atlantic, the mid-Atlantic region, to the uh to the detriment of all sorts of others, you know, workers in the Northeast, farmers in the South and West, the kind of that became the Jacksonian coalition. Um and so Jackson comes and his answer is kind of Hulk Smash. It's he's you know, Jackson in the famous uh veto uh of the bank's you know charter renewal, says uh you know, government can't be for the rich, and this is a this is an institution of privilege. And he always thought it was unconstitutional. So in the memo, which actually was written by Roger Bructani, largely drafted by Roger Bructani, he he uh lays out his reasons for for smashing it. And that basically the United States, unlike comparable industrial states, through the 19th century, does not have a centralized banking system. By contrast, you know, France and England have much more centralized banking sectors. Um, and it doesn't change until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in the early early 20th century. Um but the problem is, and here's again, I think it's a Tocqueville intention, and he saw it in embryonic form, is that once Jackson turned over the functions of the Second Bank of the United States to local pet banks, the state banks, there was all sorts of problems with that. They were not as responsible about how to lend. So there was a uh actually a great inflationary uh spiral caused by wildcat banking. Um there was a kind of minor economic recession that it took a while for the nation to come out of. So um, you know, the the small D democracy impulse, I think, I think Tocqueville tells us, I sometimes identifies the right problems, but the solutions it comes up with aren't necessarily up to the challenge, and sometimes they make things worse until the democracy figures out some other way to wield the same, you know, solution, but in a way that accounts for the for the earlier mistakes. And I think, you know, at the risk of conservative heresy, I think Federal Reserve is pretty useful and it does the things that the Second Bank of the United States does, but I think with greater congressional control um than the bank had, which bank was this imperious institution. It got fifth of its funding from the U.S. taxpayer, but uh was very resistant to uh popular control.

SPEAKER_03 29:15

Is isn't the depression uh uh sort of the key moment here though when um our elite class or the public through the election of FDR thought um the system of deregulation ends in collapse. And so we must centralize, uh someone must take care of the problem. That has to be the national government. Um you know we want we want our uh political leaders to do something when there's a crisis, and the depression was a crisis like anything, and uh like nothing we'd seen before. You had to do something. And um I'm gonna speak really in general terms here, and then you know, World War II and we win. And and going back and reading uh the the FDR in the 30s and then LBJ in the 60s, the presumption of what government can do. You know, we're gonna end poverty, and that's just the beginning. Um FDR says, you know, the the era of creativity and and innovation is over, now's the era of administration. And when you assign those speeches to the students, I they actually audibly laugh. Um this sort of arrogance and presumption that we who are in charge can fix everything and know everything. But I but I think um I wonder that they were responding to this more deregulated local local economy, national government really, the state hadn't really been built. And that ended in the Depression, and then we won World War II. Like we did the national government did do something. Um but it but it overshot the mark. And it seems to me that we we had Reagan, but it really took up as the first one, you know, maybe ironically, who's actually really said no, maybe maybe that doesn't work. I'm thinking of the Department of Education and things like that. So this is just a little analysis further into the 20th century.

SPEAKER_05 31:29

It's a very interesting and good question, and and look, the uh arch kind of New Deal historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote The Age of Jackson, his great Pulitzer-winning uh history of not just Jackson himself, but of the Jacksonian era, in part to spur the New Deals New Dealers to reform. And at the time, again, I'm not necessarily defending this, but the conclusion of the democracy by the time the era of the New Deal is the Jacksonian model, which in a way is a kind of very assertive Jeffersonianism, was incapable of dealing with the crises of the market system. So that, as Schlesinger famously put it, what we must use are Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends. Like so use the capacities of the federal government to bring about a government that protects the small in such a way that people can still live the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian ideal. Um but that that in in a situation of complexity that requires some Hamiltonian muscular kind of state.

SPEAKER_03 32:43

In practice, that built the administrative state. To get back to Johnny's original question, that led to Congress no longer.

SPEAKER_04 32:50

Well, I think it's governing. It's worth seeing that this starts defensively, right? The original progressive case for centralization in government says the market is so powerful that there has to be a political response that's capable of answering the the risks posed by markets. And this is where the progressives really begin to make the case for some centralization, even for Hamiltonianism. I mean, Herbert Crowley makes uses this line, uh uh uh uh Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends, in in 1908. Um he's making a perfectly defensive argument, not yet an assertive argument that says government can solve poverty, but rather we're facing this challenge from the market system. And I think there's actually a Tocquevillian insight here, which has always been hard for the 20th century and 21st century right to wrap its head around. Tocqueville thinks that, and actually Robert Nisbet brings this up beautifully in the 50s, Tocqueville thinks the market and the national government pose the same kind of problem. That the problem is centralized power, and that this problem can take private forms or public forms. Um, and the the big question is not, are you for the public sector or the private sector? The big question is, are you a centralizer or do you believe in the power of the people? And where where Tocqueville sees the problem coming is with a kind of soft despotism that blurs the line between the government and market power. He doesn't have all these terms for it, but he sees it. He sees it coming, and he sees it in the Jacksonian era. I think the progressives begin from a worry that government isn't up to the challenge of answering the power of markets, but their answer is the government should be like these market powers. The centralization of private power requires the centralization of public power. They don't reach for something like Tocqueville's answer, which is that ultimately this power can only be managed by various forms of decentralization and by providing agency to the public. I think the centrality of agency is one of the ways that democracy in America is especially timely right now, because so much of our politics in this moment is about a feeling of an absence of agency in our own lives. Things just happen, and the American people feel like we have no control over this, where the economy's going, what's happening at the border, how the culture that's shaping our children, all these things are just happening to us. And the the desire to reach for a political power that will give us control instead is very understandable. But I think ultimately what's actually necessary is much more like decentralized agency. And that's harder to make a case for when you feel like you're being threatened by a by a central power. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 35:38

I like to emphasize to my libertarian friend readers of Tocqueville, right, that soft despotism is not just the administrative state. He says very clearly the government becomes the chief industrialist. Right? And so there's a kind of sharing of a certain science between industry and administration, right? And as you said, a kind of um coming together of those two. It's not it's not merely administration, right? It's um it's a certain form of power that is borrowed from a new industrial aristocracy, right? Um and this is just to, you know, again, the scary stuff. Um I often ask my students when we read the soft despotism chapters, how would we know if we lived in a softly despotic state? How would we know? What would be the signs? Well, one of them is that uh you can combine soft despotism with the external forms of liberty, like casting a vote every few years, right? And if that's all the liberty that you have, it's not looking too good. It's not looking too good.

SPEAKER_02 36:42

You've all I'm I'm curious, so the against the the challenge of uh that you describe, you know, the progressives trying to address this challenge of sort of like this the role of capital kind of dominating the American system. So the the one the solution they proposed, or the the way they were trying to solve that, was sort of having a government power that could check that. Um you talked about the this Tovilian option of sort of decentralizing communities. I I guess my question is how how does the decentralized vision successfully check the centralized power of capital, which probably will not be decentralized?

SPEAKER_04 37:23

Yeah, I I think there's certainly a role for public policy in sustaining that decentralization, right? And so if there's a role for antitrust, there's a role for a lot of what the progressives are trying to do. The the trouble was they understood what they were doing as creating a kind of parallel central power to the power of the industrialized economy, rather than thinking about it as creating ways to break down the power of the centralized industrial economy. They began that way, and some of them really did make that kind of an argument. But I think very quickly you find things bleeding into, well, we can do anything with public power, and it's legitimate because it's public power. And I think one of the lessons that Tocqueville offers us is the core challenge for any free society is always going to be the shaping of the souls of its citizens. That's the core challenge for any kind of society. And so you have to ask yourself: if this is what you're doing, how are you shaping the souls of your citizens? The problem with substituting centralized public power for centralized private power is that the effect on the souls of citizens is the same. The effect is a kind of uh loss of energy, loss of agency, loss of a capacity for self-government at the individual level. And if that's the problem we need to think about, then ultimately the progressive solution isn't really a solution. But it wasn't stupid. It was an answer to a very real problem. And it's a real problem that we still have to think about.

SPEAKER_05 38:53

I would say in the answer of the of the democracy, as Toquville saw it, and as the actual Democratic Party called itself in the in the early 19th century, the answer evolves, I think, is is a dual answer. One is the progressive administrative answer, which can be very imperious. We're going to proliferate and have the famous alphabet soup of agencies. There is a problem, there is some, you know, uh uh uh triple letter acronym agency that it that the New Dealers have set up to address it, and often all sorts of inefficiency. All the critiques of the proper critiques of progressive administrativism that conservatives have have lodged ever since, and you know, they're perfectly legitimate. There was another thread, which is what government should do is to s try to serve as an umpire by raising up the countervailing power of other social sectors besides capital. So that I don't think the National Labor Relations Act, which in Congress has explicitly said the goal is to promote collective bargaining and some of the other activities of the New Dealers setting up, you know, uh electricity co-ops, farmer uh collectives, et cetera, things like that are not collectives, sorry, no, um uh uh farmers uh uh sort of price negotiation mechanism and so on, that is slightly uh um government supported are the same as the barrage of administrative agencies. I think that kind of work, you're saying, look, there's gonna be big capital. It's inevitable. In some cases, big capital is rational, right? Why? Because uh you have uh increasing returns to scale when you have factory effects. That's why we don't have mom and pop tower tire manufacturers or car manufacturers. It has to be done at scale. Um, and there's also network effects in network industries. You know, the total antitrust sort of view doesn't make sense. It's really irrational if you have 200 towns to collect them, to connect them using a hundred different rail lines. It makes more sense to have two or three kind of regulated regional monopoly rail lines or national even regulated monopolies or or cartels. But as long as the consumer, the worker, et cetera, et cetera, are empowered relative to the big. Um and so I would separate that. I think to me, that's a that's perfectly tukvillian to come up with other mechanisms for checking private power that are actually, in a way, are market actors, right, themselves. But they by banding together, they they are able to bargain in a way that is um less lopsided than than if they were to go up singly against the big market actor. That I would separate from the very administrative model.

SPEAKER_00 41:55

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I was just gonna say he describes them as the democratic version of aristocratic persons, right? They become a kind of corporate body in the way that an aristocrat in the Estates General in France was part of a corporate body, right? Representing a group of interests.

SPEAKER_03 42:10

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The problem is though, you have okay, so corporate power, what we've been referring to as capital, dominates, and so you need a countervailing power, which becomes the state. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Not the state.

SPEAKER_05 42:22

It would be like uh labor union, civil society, you know, consumer co-ops. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 42:27

Yeah, but it's all these um are cultivated countervailing powers through the state. And the state itself then becomes an actor. And what happens is corporate power and state power merge. And and where this happens today is elite higher education. A perfect example of state power, corporate power. I mean, it is the modern-day oligarchy. And I just think it was a mistake from the beginning to think we can fight corporate the rise of private power, corporate power, with the rise of the state, and the state is gonna defend the little guy against the corporate power. That corporate power is, and and I think young conservatives are naive, they don't, they fail to see that. That corporate power is always gonna get control of the state. And and wokeism, which was, and this gets to Yval's point about the regime shaping the souls of its citizens. Wokeism is the perfect example of the unification of private Harvard, a private corporation that we now see was funded dramatically by the state. The state Harvard, the Harvards are always going to get the state money. And then imposing a vision on the people that the people themselves do not want. I think that is the legacy of the the rise of the administrative state. It is wokeism. And I will say, I think Toeville says it's always going to lead to wokeism.

SPEAKER_05 44:05

I don't think he says that literally, but but uh even taking your point, I think uh the problem is that that the merger between capital and state or corporation and state had already taken place. That was the complaint of the Jacksonians about the Second Bank of the United States and various other elements of the Hamiltonian state. So markets aren't markets don't grow on trees, they are creations of law. And so the United States had set out to create a certain kind of national economy, and that required uh, you know, not just protecting private property rights, although that's certainly part of it, um, including like preventing states from from altering the terms of loans in the Constitution, but also like canal, bridge, all the things that I mentioned, that was already taking place. So the idea that there was this pristine state in which state and market can remain apart, and then the kind of you know, progressives or democrats or whoever came and and and and created this distinct you know, merge the distinction between the two or erase the distinction between the two is um But the exact didn't exist.

SPEAKER_03 45:16

Yeah, the examples you point to though are arguably sort of natural monopolies, canals, roads, electricity, but not education, which is not a natural monopoly, which would be much better if it was decentralized. And so I now how you determine, you know, where the state what look, it doesn't make sense to have a hundred electric companies agreed. Um but it also does not make sense to have one uh feder uh federal or national school system right dictated from Washington, DC. That certainly does not make sense. Whereas the uh if there's going to be governmental money in education, which I I think is reasonable, the very best solution from the beginning would have been to turn it over to parents to prevent centralization. And yes, it's gonna uh all sorts of um schools will make bad choices and fail, but at least the failures are limited to a local community that can learn. When the failures come from the top.

SPEAKER_04 46:19

I think this in a way always comes to what problem are we trying to solve? Is the problem that the wrong people have centralized power, or is the problem that centralized power can't work? And I the the the there's always a tendency, and we are all liable to this, to just think, well, if we had the power rather than they have the power, then we would use the power well. I think part of what Tocqueville's telling us is that if we think in terms of how we are forming the souls of democratic citizens, centralization is a problem. It's not totally avoidable, but it is a problem. And to identify it only as a problem when the government does it or only as a problem when markets do it is to miss the nature of the problem so that we should want to lean in the direction of decentralization of power that allows for agency. It's not always possible, but I certainly think that when it comes to education, for example, which is at the core of forming the souls of citizens, the necessity of that kind of decentralization really shows itself. It's not it's not always easy to do, but I think if we see that that's what we're trying to do, then we can be in a better place to avoid the temptation to just say the problem is that they control a centralized power, and now that we won one election, we control it, and therefore it's not a problem anymore. It just doesn't really seem to work that way in the long run.

SPEAKER_05 47:38

So just a the point about the umpire state that helps raise up the countervailing powers of other social elements. So in the late 19th century, the Hamiltonian state, one of the things it did was workers would organize to try to bargain collectively. The state was not involved. This was essentially a perfectly Tocquevillian voluntary activity. However, um, you know, pre-New Deal judges would say that that's would strike down their ability to do that.

SPEAKER_02 48:05

So that already Well then they strike it, they'd say it's like a cartel or whatever.

SPEAKER_05 48:09

Yeah, exactly right. Or that they they have to deal singly with uh with the employer, and the uh to do otherwise is over you know, overstepping private. Or the employers themselves would have what's called um uh yellow dog contracts, which means that in the employment agreement there is a provision that says you cannot uh bargain collectively or seek to form collective bargaining units. Um and the the courts would uphold that as you know kind of private contract. But the act of the court doing that, that is government action in favor of one side of the national economy and over against another.

SPEAKER_04 48:43

I just think it's important to see the way that this has evolved so that by our time, the the labor unions exist to lobby the government. That's what they do. They're national organizations based in Washington that lobby the national government. I think the form of labor organizing in the early 20th century and even the middle 20th century was very constructive in American life. And I I I I think there's an enormously important role for worker organizing. So we can go into why that is.

SPEAKER_05 49:11

I think that's partly right about some unions. Um depends on the sector, depends on the union. But I'm just so I'm just pointing out contra um my friend Phil, that like there was a time when, again, state was pristinely in a pristine state separate from corporate activity, and then it was the progressives who came and changed them. What the what the democracy responded to was this sense that already, always, already, the market is a product of state action, whether it's judicial action, whether it's the kind of developmentalism of the Hamiltonian state. And the response to it, I think, is to try to protect yourself in a collective way. And that collective way needn't be state-led. It needn't be the an administrative agency to come do this and that.

SPEAKER_03 49:58

It's it's to set up the public sector unions are the end result. A force, no doubt, that has been good for teachers, but it's led to a catastrophic system of education. And and and uh look, I I'm not in favor of public sector unions. But that is the great public sector unions are a great example of a fear Tocqueville has of centralization. Right. And um I think we have to be very careful um to think that we can manage state power. And there's nothing in our historical experience.

SPEAKER_05 50:44

So you're against private economy unionism?

SPEAKER_03 50:47

But there's nothing in our historical experience that leads us to believe, um, leads me to have confidence um that uh once centralization starts, it can be stopped.

SPEAKER_05 50:59

But what I'm saying is centralization was already in place. It was just in a in a in a it created a power dynamic that was very lopsided. And so what happened in response is actually an organic movement of people coming together and saying, if you want to hire for this job, you have to bargain collectively with us, right? So that the uh because otherwise, given that in most industries you don't have a plethora, even already by the time of when Tim Tocqueville was writing, already you were having centralization in most markets, in most sectors, right? By the late 19th century, almost all sectors except agriculture, the same firm controls either 70% of the market, Otis elevator, 90% of the market, British American tobacco, et cetera. When you have a situation like that, to say that people can, you know, bargain on a fair basis, uh, and by the way, I don't want to make this about labor theory, but it's this is I'm saying this is a very Tocquevillian institution of labor union, is is not possible. You can't bargain when you're it's a monopsony. The buyer of labor power, there's only one. And if you don't if you don't want to starve, you have to you have to deal with it. I think a lot of the attempts of the of the New Dealers, where a Tocquevillian is to raise up countervailing powers organic to society. In other cases, I fully grant you, a gazillion administrative agencies that think they can regulate every corner of life in a rational way. Totally wrong. And and and much of that has received a lot of conservative pushback. Much of it is uh, I would say defanged now. But I just want to separate the two forms of response to what is already this alliance of capital and state.

SPEAKER_02 52:45

I remember a conversation that we had, actually, I think it was on a different ISI podcast, and you used the phrase democratic soul. And that phrase just stuck in my mind. And I'm wondering if you could kind of elaborate on that in light of Yuvol's um comment about the way that centralizing power shapes souls, and then Phil, given your work on religious liberty, if you could talk about what is the democratic soul at prayer, and is that different than the medieval uh soul at prayer or the ancient soul at prayer?

SPEAKER_00 53:17

And I'm gonna move in the direction that you just suggested, but starting from this question of centralization and decentralization, right? Um to say we want decentralization means we already have centralization. We're already that means we're already within a particular kind of system. And in this, I I follow my my mentor and and um a colleague of mine at Catholic University, Russ Hittinger, who does a lot of work in social ontology, and I think makes the point really well that subsidiarity is not decentralization. Right? Subsidiarity is a different kind of thing that has to do with the right action who you know being taken by the right people with authority at the right level. And so subsidiarity can lend itself in some situations to a kind of centralization at the right level for the right thing, and to less centralization, right? Uh devolution and decentralization says that the power belongs in the center. And that's not subsidiarity, right? That the power or the agency to do a particular thing lies with those most intimately touched by it, right? Um McIntyre has this wonderful point in um Independent Rational Animals where he says, like, localism isn't the greatest thing either, guys, right? We all have local communities that can be pretty tyrannical, right? So let's not praise local communities unnecessarily, right? And so um part of the danger to the soul, generally speaking, um, under a condition of extreme centralization beyond what might be appropriate, right, is a certain conditioning to abandon those activities and domains of life over which, properly speaking, you ought to have agency, authority, input, free will, right? And this is something Tocqueville says very clearly in the famous and haunting passage on soft despotism that they gradually lose uh the use of their free will little by little, right? Um and so um, you know, some some Tocquevillians, I I have a pet theory that people are attracted to reading Tocqueville because they're they have a kind of anxiety over whether they have an aristocratic or a democratic soul, right? Um and and so you know, I have some from some friends who are also Tocqueville scholars who really reject the idea of us all having democratic souls, right? And we've been but we've been raised in a democracy, right? Our our default is a lot of these uh democratic points of view.

SPEAKER_02 55:44

I'm curious about that. Why isn't it okay, democratic habits, a democratic point of the way of the thing?

SPEAKER_00 55:48

Like the conservative mind, something like this. Well, I think I think this is Tocqueville rejecting certain kinds of enlightenment liberalism, right? My my one of my teachers, Harvey Mansfield, says that one of the things that makes his liberalism distinctive, it's it's liberalism with soul. You have to imagine it in Harvey's voice, liberalism with soul, right? Um and and I mean, Tocqueville's a student of Pascal, and in that way a kind of neo-Augustinian in in moments, right? He has a great appreciation for the aspirations, the dreams, um the yearning for the transcendent. Um, there are passages in in volume two, part two, where you know, if you if you were to take it out and say, is this C.S. Lewis or Tocqueville, it might be a you might throw it up, right? Um and so so you know, the fact that Tocqueville is interested in the way in which a regime forms a soul, um, again, makes him a strange kind of liberal. Because a lot of liberals are going to claim that the job of a regime doesn't isn't to form your soul, it's not gonna form your soul. Um we aim to have it as little, you know, impact your soul as little as possible, right? But it's sort of it's sort of inevitable, right? Law's a teacher. Law's a teacher.

SPEAKER_03 56:59

No, this is this is the Aristotelian elements of Tocqueville. I mean, he he sees c correctly, I think, that every regime shapes the souls of of its citizens. That is inescapable. Uh even a regime that tries to be neutral itself is shaping. Yeah, yeah. You know, teaches us all to be uh indifferent and uh lack conviction uh or have convictions about only about being neutral.

SPEAKER_00 57:24

Um only about fairness or something like this.

SPEAKER_03 57:28

I think um you can't beat something with nothing. And I think one of um the difficulties conservatives have had over the years, and and I credit Sarab and and uh my colleague Pat Denineen um with helping us see this is uh we've conservatives have talked for generations about liberty, liberty, liberty, individual liberty. Fine. But that doesn't answer the question, liberty for what? And and the and the real virtue of uh a liberal democracy, or the the quintessential modern American virtue, I would say is res responsibility. We ought to be uh our regime ought to uh attempt to create citizens who are responsible for themselves, for their family, as much as possible in their capacities for their community. Uh and so this ties to religious liberty in the following way. Um the state isn't responsible for the citizens' religious beliefs. Churches and church authorities are. And so here the role of the state is to um step back and remove itself or not enter this area, to create the space for churches and individuals in their churches to assume their responsibilities, to do their duties. And so the the virtue because every regime ought to or does promote certain virtues, the real virtue of a liberal democracy, of the founding, even though the founders perhaps didn't use this language as much as they should have, is the language of responsibility. And I think what I see in Tocqueville is um we talk about agency, and agency is the the lack of agency, is a lack of responsibility for oneself. Um so whether it's education, um I mean I think that should be our sort of architectonic virtue, or one of them. But like how is this public policy, is this agency, or is creating this agency or removing this agency, will it help citizens and and communities to become more responsible, to to live the sort of lives that they ought to be living. Um and here freedom is an essential element. Um to exercise the virtue of responsibility, one has to be free. And that also means you you may not live as well as you should have. I mean, that's part, that's what it means to live in a free society. But the aim is not freedom per se, the aim is responsibility.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:05

You know, there's a way where b Edmund Birkin criticizing the radicalism of his fellow Whigs and of the French, he says they they answer all vices with the all-atoning name of liberty. And he's a great friend of liberty, but the idea that liberty is an answer to every social problem that just says, well, freedom, um is not a way to think about society because ultimately there has to be a bigger picture about, again, what kinds of people are we trying to form here? And what does the next generation uh need to have from us? I think that kind of question necessarily points to responsibility. Responsibility really is a wonderfully American word. It actually used to be the case that the Oxford English Dictionary said the first use of responsibility in English, it's older in French, but the first use in English was in j was from James Madison. And then they found a much older use, which is very inconvenient to me. But the the idea that that the way that we think about public life begins with a sense that it's ours. It's us, right? It's we. The Constitution's first word is we. The that amazing declaration's uh, you know, second paragraph starts with we, we hold. It it's it's something we have to do together, and you can't think about politics as something other people are responsible for. You can't think about social life as other people's problems. I think that really is the essential virtue of a free society. And as you say, it's a free society. You need freedom for that, but you need freedom for that, for to be the kind of person who approaches the the future as your own responsibility.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:41

Aaron Ross Powell And this gets you into kind of virtue ethical territory, right? Again, there's a wonderful line that Josh Mitchell makes a lot of, I think, appropriately in his his work on Tocqueville. Sentiments and ideas are renewed, the heart grows larger, and the mind expands by the reciprocal action of men upon one another, right? And that's pre-political, right? Um another, I just he's w he's I mean, he's such an amazing stylist, right? Um the despot doesn't worry, this is not in the section on self-despotism, it's earlier in the section on individualism. The despot doesn't worry about you loving him so long as you don't love one another, right? And so there's a way in which I I would maybe use the language of, I mean, responsibility captures one side of it, but there's also something participatory, right? And allowing yourself to be shaped by that participation, right, that you then carry over into other domains of life, right? And so there's, you know, again, Joshua Mitchell's language is spillover effects between these domains of life. They're not, they're not um, they're they're impermeable, right? We move between them because that's the kind of thing that a human being is. We move between these domains of life and we don't abandon our habits when we move from one to another.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:52

Aaron Ross Powell Two thoughts which aren't related but are s are are spurred by by my colleague's remarks. One is just to focus on how he describes the American aristocratic soul. Um and the he basically says that the uh the American aristocrat, because he's been so alarmed by the rise of the democracy, is withdrawn from politics in some ways and and and relishes his private life. He's he goes to his opulent home. But when he goes outside, he says he has to be extremely humble. And he there's this passage where he says, one imagine what it's like when he shakes hands with his like with his cobbler and the contempt he has for him. Imagine people coming up to you in the street, but he has to say hi to him and shake his hand. What's going through his head? One imagines the disgust. I can't remember what the word is, contempt or disgust. Um but uh that that's a very real thing that was happening at the time. In um in an earlier era, um, the Federalists were quite openly the party of a kind of American aristocracy. It's obvious that like lots of the rabble shouldn't vote, shouldn't are you kidding me? Um and you still get that in the early Jacksonian age, in the reactions of some of the like surviving Federalist grandees. The party isn't even around anymore, but you see letters where they're like, Well, liberty is over, this this uncouth figure, Andrew Jackson, has come around and like is allowing all these people who have no business participating in public life to participate. Which leads me to maybe uh uh segue to to the virtue ethics part. I love how Sarah said the virtue ethical dimension of Tocqueville, which is nurtured by participation. I think there's a lot of this we could say that is i the of volume one where he's just defending the political animal. And he's reveling in the fact that Americans get to be political, not just in the the big like going to parliament or passing laws or writing newspaper articles, but in the way that I mentioned at the beginning, that they're like, uh okay, there's a hindrance on the road. We're gonna like fix this politically. And that's uh that the fact that in a way he's a virtue ethicist is a thought that I really appreciate Sarah mentioning his comments.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:11

My forthcoming my forthcoming book when I can manage to get it out. But on this point, but on this point, there's a there's a line in the Ancien regime and the revolution that I think, again, you could write a whole book on in its relation to democracy in America, which was the medieval parish became the New England Township. So there's something that he sees towards the end of his life as fundamentally medieval, a different form of liberty in in the kind of the township existence, the township life of America, right? That I think maybe helps to explain some of these tensions that we're talking about between this kind of state and centralization and an older form of liberty that endures in some places in American life for, you know, a century or 75 years or something like this.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:57

Aaron Powell I think there is a way that he's looking for a mixed regime. In a way. He's looking to preserve the virtues of the aristocracy while he fully sees the vices and is glad that they're gone. And so he's always sort of praising these little pockets of aristocratic habits in American life, the lawyers who are preservers of tradition in a democratic society, and the these ways that local communities sort of function like they they play the part of aristocrats in Britain. He knows they're counter-cultural, but is sort of hopeful they can survive just to sustain some of those virtues. Democracy by itself has a lot of vices that have to be answered by these virtues. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:38

When Tocqueville talks about religion, he seems very hopeful. He says, you know, religion can survive, thrive on its own. In fact, it will thrive if it's more disconnected or separated from the state. And he's he says, you know, for for the purposes of the political community, uh it doesn't matter exactly what religion uh the Americans protect pr practice, just that they practice the religion. And and all religions in America teach the same morality. And uh when I was last teaching this, um a student said that's no longer true. Um and if it's no longer true, what do we make of Tocqueville thinking that our our moral habits can be cultivated outside of the state through uh various re American religions? But if the religions themselves don't, if if Americans are not religious or uh decre increasingly religious, or if or if the American religions are just um progressivism itself can be considered a religion with a very different morality, what do we make of that? And I I didn't have a good answer for my my student. It has would Tocqueville say the same things and would he have the same confidence of the ability of religion to nurture the morality that a democratic people need.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:59

I'm gonna make briefly the optimistic case drawn from a a passage that I like triple underline every time I encounter it. And it's now extra I plug my book, I have a book coming out on normality and why it endures. And one of the dimensions of normality that I think are irrepressible is just the the people's religious um uh impulse. And there's a line in there where he says that um atheism or irreligion are are the exception and and but the I'm slightly paraphrasing, but but religion is the is the default, the natural impulse. And now that raises a discomforting question, which I don't have an answer to. Um really just doubling down on your question, is are various things that we're seeing that have today in today's America that have the the qualities of religious action and behavior um but are explicitly not religious or claim to be not religious? Is that is that does that leave Tuckville vindicated? Is that an optimistic fact about our life that even the people who are opposed to religion in a way have to um it can't help but articulate who they are and what they believe in quasi-religious or even explicitly ritualistic terms, like you can think of the Black Lives Matter liturgies, the kneeling, the kind of public confession. Environmentalism is huge uh kind of you know, and so how how would Tocqueville read American religion in 2026 when we're recording? Is it I don't have an answer to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:35

In some sense, I see those are those are some at some level like uh outgrowths of a certain uh Christianity, but they're sort of heretical element, or they're emphasizing one thing like at the equality at the expense of the others or the environment.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:51

And that's what Tocqueville says we're going to do, right? That that we love vague, general ideas, we love to make a system of them, we love to um you know, he says we're we'll you know, we have a temptation to pantheism because of this, right? He even describes again, describes centralization in the same way. We we love uh a kind of uniform law that we just impose on the matter, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:16

And connect that to the temptation to pantheism. How does what does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:20

Aaron Powell That um out of our love of equality comes certain intellectual tendencies, right? And we want therefore everything to be just about as equal, just about the same.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:31

Democracy is religion, everything is sacred.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:33

Yeah. Um interesting. I think on some of these points, right, you have to disentangle because um you know when we speak about religion in Tocqueville, right, we're speaking about Christianity specifically, but we're also speaking about um religion as a kind of social good with practices and and rituals and all these sorts of things. So I think you can say, well, um I I think Tocqueville, you know, would say that any society needs some form of religion understood as practices that bind you together in a kind of um you know, this is somewhat Augustinian, right? Um I think the the deeper question that you're pointing at, right, that we're kind of narrowing in on, right, is what if the first principles of the religious experience of a community change over time, something like this? Um and how does that sit with the laws and and the other customs and things that have emerged out of it? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:35

So one thing that's different now, and this is not so much at Notre Dame, but when I teach at other places, um there's a whole generation of students that it's not that they've rejected the religion of their parents. They just don't have anything, no biblical knowledge, but no grounding in a tradition. And are they are they Catholic by sort of baptism? All sorts of things. Catholic for sure, also Protestant. I mean the no shortage of this in Judaism. Yeah, yeah. The parents were faithful. Um sorry, the grandparents were very faithful. The parents uh, you know, grew up and then if they're Catholic, they got uh baptized and confirmed. And then um, pose on their children and the other. The next generation, my generation, 54, about to die, like Toadville. Um my generation, like we all, to put it in Catholic terms, we all were baptized and went to first communion, maybe were received the sacrament of confirmation, but our parents stopped bringing us to church around middle school or high school. Now they're the parents, and their kids have no religion whatsoever. And that's such a phenomenally interesting just so social fact. And I and I'm not sure how Tocqueville's analysis uh applies or does not apply when you have a certain segment of the population, and especially in our blue cities, that just don't really have religion. I mean, maybe they do in different ways in these different forms, whether it's sports teams or political causes. Um but I just don't know. I I what we need is a Tocqueville to explain what will hold us together as a people when religion is no longer that um, I think there's a way here that the good news is the bad news with him, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:13:32

That the the hunger for religion really is permanent and universal. The trouble is that hunger doesn't feed itself, and there are healthy ways and unhealthy ways. So that the worry shouldn't be that everyone will will l abandon religion. That just isn't likely to happen because we all feel the need that it meets. But how is that need met requires institutions that are grounded in tradition and ultimately grounded in truth. And in the absence of those, we're gonna meet that need in other ways, which are just not going to be as healthy.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:04

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And how would you, in terms of strengthening those institutions, you know, is it how how do we reform in an age that has more of a revolutionary mindset towards institutions, how do we I mean look, I I think I think that in some ways it's a mistake to think we have a more revolutionary mindset.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:20

The the the the religions that succeed with younger people are the ones that make demands of them. That don't just say uh th y you're wonderful and are loved, that's important, and you are, but that say this is demanded of you, this is what's required. I mean, you know, literally in my tradition, this is what you can eat and what you can't, and too bad. Um those are actually more attractive in 21st century America to younger people than the religious communities that take it easy on believers and just say be nice to each other. So I that suggests to me that we're not quite right to think that uh younger people just don't want authority. I I think that's almost the opposite of what we're learning from younger Americans in the 21st century.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:05

And Britons as well. In in both Britain and the United States, there's some people can overstate it its extent, but it's called the the quiet revival. Uh I certainly see it when I go to when I go to Mass in New York City. Like doesn't matter which, I mean, I have my own parishion, but I try other ones from time to time. All of them seem packed all the time with young people. And you know, the the survey data show that is what we've all just said that young people typically gravitate within their broad traditions, whether it's Judaism or Christianity, toward those uh sub-denominations that are that emphasize more demanding uh moral aspects and and and more traditional or reverent uh liturgies. Now, I think this kind of genre of new believer, and there's also the kind of unchurched or semi-churched believer, is a real challenge for all of our faith communities because they can also be faith, you know, ideas of faith in a kind of half-garbled form without an authoritative guidance, which he takes for Tocqueville takes for granted, um, can be dangerous. You know, the sort of cockamaby ideas can spread.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:16

Yeah, and I totally agree with that in terms of the religious uh authorities, you know, people wanting to establish more rigorous kind of practice. But I guess with other institutions, whether it's the academy, whether it, you know, other institutions that especially young Americans have lost faith or hope in, how would you how do you propose kind of revitalizing them?

SPEAKER_04 1:16:39

Aaron Powell I mean, look, obviously there's no easy answer to that question, but I think broadly speaking, there too, what's appealing is the promise that you will be shaped to be a better person. I mean, if we think about our the the way in which Americans have lost confidence in institutions, the great exception at the national level that stands out in every survey is the American military. And the US military very self-consciously, in the wake of Vietnam, rebuilt public confidence in itself, not by persuading the public that it could win wars. That's not actually all that evident in our history, but by persuading the public that the military forms respectable and honorable men and women. That's actually how the military approaches the public. If you think about how they recruit, it's about the few, the proud, the marines. It's not about how uh how our wars have gone. And the idea that this is an institution that makes people into more admirable and serious human beings is actually very effective. If somebody tells you now that they went to Harvard, you would maybe think, well, that's a smart person, they got into Harvard. If they tell you they went to the Naval Academy, you think, well, this is a serious person, not because they got in, that's hard too, but because that's what the Naval Academy does, is it makes serious people, or at least that's our understanding of it. I think if more institutions approach the public in that way and said, well, what we do is we make serious people who are engaged in this particular uh occupation or profession or or line of work, uh it's not how any institution thinks it wants to be heard, but I think that that actually is a lot of what the American public looks for. Trust in institutions has to do with the sense that they form trustworthy people. There's just no way around it. That, too, is a kind of aristocratic way of thinking. I mean it is it it runs against some of the grain of democratic life, but I think it's it's how we need to think about it.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:31

And the least effective kind of military recruiting by contrast is when a while ago, and then I it's gone actually, thank thank God, are the ones where where where the military says, come join the military, we'll pay off your loans. An army of one. That's right. Yeah, an army of one. That's actually the opposite. The army of a nation. Yeah. Right? But another note of note of Tocquevilian optimism, similar to the uh military one that you've all highlighted, is actually in drug prevention and drug uh treatment among young people. The most effective programs are not ones that where someone goes to the school and says, you know, I was an addict and it was terrible. Like the most effective recent drug interventions that in the most affected communities, for example, in Appalachia where opioids are a problem, fentanyl is a problem, are ones in which we've borrowed this from Iceland, apparently, which had this problem and they solved it, is where you give young people activities to do where it's uh, you know, instead of your time being, you know, spent whatever you want to do, but occasionally the school or the police or whoever lectures you or disciplines you or punishes you, we are going, you know, nonprofit, very Tochphilian way. We're going to like take you kayaking. And it works, right? Though those those kids, I mean I can't remember the statistics, but they're dramatically less likely to pick up drugs, or if they're doing it, they're less likely to do it as severely and so on. So I j uh there are these green shoots everywhere you look, even in 2026 America, that vindicate um the the kind of uh virtue of participation as he saw it in such a rich way in the early 19th century.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:17

Can I ask you both of your both of your last comments about institution shaping people and the particular examples here? But in a way, we just went through um in our universities institutions that really wanted to shape people in in all sorts of pathological ways. Right. Um and I think a lot of especially the young men are reacting. I mean, there's a new type of young conservative man, and I actually think it's a relatively healthy reaction, though it can go off the rails. And that kid, when he was 12 or 13, was said, you can be a woman. And um and actually your your maleness is toxic. And those young kids are those young men especially are just like they don't trust anyone over 30. They think institutions are corrupt, they think they've been lied to, um, they're reasserting themselves as men tend to do. So we've had institutions trying to shape people in in all sorts of unhealthy, unnatural ways.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:23

Well well, some of the irony of that, though, is that when you think of the examples that you would muster to support that point, it would be the Harvards and the Yales, right? Which make a claim to a kind of universality in their student population. You can be anything here, but once you get here, we're gonna rigorously police you, right? As opposed to, I mean, I was thinking about my alma mater when Yval was speaking, right? It's a Southern College, Davidson, that had for generations produced uh lawyers, clergymen, and doctors, and then had an honor code that was, you know, a hundred some years old, right? You could only, you know, only UVAs can rival it, right? And that produces a kind of person and it attracts a particular kind of person, right? And so it seems to me that the army is doing something similar, which is saying, we only want a particular kind of person, and we're gonna make you into the sort of person that you know, truth in advertising, right? Whereas maybe some of these other institutions, uh by virtue, you know, there there's a kind of deception there that they're claiming to be universal, right? Um while actually, you know, perversely forming the person.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:30

Aaron Powell This will get me in trouble, but the the slogan of my college at Notre Dame, the College of Liberal Arts, is uh uh um uh study everything, do anything. Totally. Like we don't know anything. Come perform.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:48

Well, I yeah. In the train station here, uh I took a picture of it. There's a a university, actually it's in sort of my backyard, Westchester, uh and they had a big ad and it just said pursue your passions. And it was Westchester University. Sell your bonds.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:05

Yeah, I mean look, I I think that there's a there's a a way in which the concerns of those young men that you point to um argue for the opposite of what they too often seek, right? They argue for respectable institutions, not for anti-institutionalism. And those very people will find those institutions appealing. So that I think sometimes it's just the case, and and there the there are elements of this in Tocqueville too, where what we need is the opposite of what we're asking for. And to understand what we need, we need to think a little more deeply about the nature of the human person, and again, about what we're missing, not what we have too much of. We we have a natural tendency to say, liberate me from this, and sure, we should liberate these people from Harvard, I agree with that. But th in order for them to be able to be formed by more worthy institutions, that second part of it takes real work. And I think that's the part where we have to persuade ourselves and persuade other people that ultimately a free society can't work if we're all against all the institutions. Because uh a a free person is not just a a natural phenomenon. A free person is a social achievement, and that requires a society that is geared to producing that kind of person and all kinds of institutions that take that work seriously. So we can't anti-institutionalism isn't going to get us out of the trouble of of misformed institutions. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:30

Yvonne, how d how do we uh reform or have uh a new class of people who will take charge of our institutions? I mean, how much I mean let me rephrase that as a question. How much of our failures of institutions are failures of those who have been leading our institutions?

SPEAKER_04 1:24:47

Aaron Powell Well, I yeah, I mean I think they're inseparable from each other, and so the failure is a failure of a generation of American elites who have not wanted to take responsibility for their part in our society as its elites. And there again, the solution is not simply anti-elitism, though I am anti-these elites. The solution is to think about what our leaders should be and what they should be trying to do. And ultimately it it's a matter of education, it's a matter of formation, it's also a matter of each of us thinking, what part can I play in improving some set of institutions that I have a hand in, because we're all involved in one way or another in formative institutions that matter to the rising generation. And so I think we can't escape that. We have to see, even to the extent that the problem is this sort of generation of elites that's failed our society, we can't stand to the side and say they cause the problem. We have to understand the ways in which we are part of they and take some role in changing the way institutions function. Everybody has to do that.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:49

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Your answer to this question, I think, is going to be both and, but would would uh like I'm thinking of education, um, especially uh grade school education, is the is the best path forward. Let's just create new institutions. I mean, there's this uh burgeoning m movement of new classical schools emerging, or is it we need to uh take back the old institutions and and yeah, but I think these things work together, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:26:15

They naturally work together. Uh it's hard for me to say we should just abandon the public school and start new because that's where 80 percent of the kids are. Uh that means abandoning them, and I don't think we should be prepared to do that. So you have to fight for the public schools, but you also have to build alternatives that create models that maybe those schools will learn from. I think the history of higher education is an example of that. All of the late 19th century universities, uh Stanford and Chicago and Duke and and so on, they created models that then transform the existing elite universities. The Ivy Leagues changed in the direction of those universities because they were clearly doing something better. I think that's the way to think about higher education now and the way to think about uh education in general.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:57

And I think AI will very quickly make some of these changes for higher education, right? Um, the the advice learn to code and get a computer science degree that was given out ten years ago, right? What if you what if your computer science degree can't keep up with the way Claude is changing every week, right? That's gonna really but I but I think it's gonna change the shape of the research university and it's also going to um I mean, you know, job situation, all these sorts of things. But for those of us who who uh come from a liberal arts background, we're having to think about, you know, re you know, how do we recommit to the permanent things um in this changing higher education landscape.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:40

I wonder the the the aristocratic element of the soul, or the the the part of the society that Tocqueville now celebrates and now can sometimes criticize, like the passage I mentioned I mentioned, that you would call the Americas the Democratic uh aristocratic soul. That's education is one of those areas where I think it should come to reign a little bit more uh confidently, in this not just in the sense of uh not disrespecting, for example, its own canon, which was something even like Herbert Marcusa in the 60s recognized. There's this very famous episode where student black student radicals raise their hand at Marcusa and said, Why should we read, you know, w whatever the Western canon? And he's like, there's just a certain number of things that you should read, whether you're black or white. And actually, if you read it, it can be a service to your emancipatory projects and so on. So that's part of it. But also just I think part of I maybe Sarah can correct me if I'm wrong, but part of being a properly aristocratic institution in a democratic context is just doing what you're supposed to do. We have too much institutional dri drift where like the police has to do mental health, the mental health worker has to police, the school is activism, the activist is an educator, the post office is the you know what I mean is like ev I part of it is just like this is the duty that's been assigned to me, and I'm gonna carry out it out to the end. Um I think the way he describes the professions in America, at least in his time, reflect that. And the way that professions have functioned since then is a betrayal of that.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:20

I think there's not just uh institution or activity creep horizontally, but it's also vertically, right? Such that, you know, um, you know, uh I have I have many wonderful students, right? Some of them have more spelling errors than they should as college students, right? And so um, you know, it's very uh it's interesting to read Tocqueville on education thinking about just how different.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:44

I mean, uh, you know, uh, at least they're writing their own papers if they have spelling errors. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:51

I every time I get, you know, I I a lot of M-dashes.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:55

No, I mean it's it's I I have a deep joy in my heart every time I receive a paper that is genuinely a college student's paper. I'm like, you have integrity, you are learning to think and write for yourself. This is beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:07

Um put a few spelling errors and you didn't just work hard.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:14

You be you you showed up. You're present in this kind of chat GPT stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:19

That's where the the oral exam is a real um is a real good thing. But yeah, um but but you know the Tocqueville, the educational world that he's describing is one in which very few people learn their Latin and Greek at university, and most people have a technical education, right? But that's against the backdrop of a much higher standard of ordinary K-12. I mean, he famously describes being at the pot, you know, you know, being being um uh you know out in the West and coming across a house that has Shakespeare and the Bible, right? And so the the the default learning is is higher in some of these core areas than you might have assumed for his period of time, right? And that I think is certainly higher than the default knowledge of Shakespeare today, right? Um and so so, you know, how how you know, I I mean, I'm a I'm a college professor, I love what I do, I love my students, right? But um again, with with AI and this question of how do you form a new elite, I think some of it has to involve forming non-elites, forming ordinary people better at the most basic levels, right? Uh, in middle school, in high school, right? And that's that's not an easy task to take on, but it seems to be absolutely necessary.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:40

And Sarah, we're about out of time, but I want to give you the last word. So you've devoted your life to you know teaching and studying uh Alexis to Tocqueville. So what for you is sort of as you're doing this week by week with students, why I don't know, what are you hopeful about or why why is Tocqueville sort of the um the muse that you're using to engage students in our current moment?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:04

Um again, he teaches them to think philosophically and creatively about politics. I think that's desperately needed, right? Um I think, you know, whether you know Tocqueville could be said to be um a liberal who's also maybe the first post-liberal, insofar as that he sees what's possibly you know, what could go off the rails in a liberal democratic order, right? And and that sort of both and approach to thinking about politics, I think is very healthy and it helps to develop a vision for what's politically possible, right? Um too often um whether it's because of reasons of of ideology or or I don't know, I think we get we get locked into thinking that the way in which we live today is the only the only way, right? And Tocqueville in in displaying to us very nicely the differences between the aristocratic and the democratic, right? Uh trains the mind in that kind of creative and visionary thinking. And and that's something I very much hope to impart to my students when I read him in the classroom.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:11

Thank you for watching Project Cosmos, Conversations on the Future of Civilization, which is a production of ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. If you're a student, professor, or lifelong learner who wants to get more involved with ISI, visit isi.org or follow us on social media to learn more about our educational programs that teach the foundations of Western and American civilization and what it means to be a great and good man or woman today. That's isi.org or like and follow us on social media. Thank you.