Alexis de Tocqueville, Meet My Mom
My mother had a democratic head and an aristocratic heart. She passed away in the fall of 2022 after an interesting, difficult, and well-lived life. She grew up in a small village in Friesland; leaving her family behind, she immigrated to Winnipeg when she was 20, and then to the United States when she was 29. She became a proud American citizen in 1967. A political junkie, she never quite understood why her son, a political scientist, never kept up on the news. Her consternation over the election of Donald Trump prompted some interesting conversations between the two of us, but concern turned to near despair on January 6th of 2021. She was on that day in a hospital room having, in her 91st year, contracted COVID. She made it through that OK, but she called me from her hospital bed begging me to explain what was going on and to offer some reassurance. She was in tears, wondering what had become of her adopted country.
She idolized the Kennedys and Britain’s royal family, but it wasn’t until the Trump presidency that I realized my mom was a closet monarchist. Granted, she believed in democratic processes, but she never lost her Dutch respect for the House of Orange. As a young child, she received a plate from Queen Wilhelmina, which she proudly displayed on the wall of her kitchen throughout her life. The plate symbolized her sense of loyalty but, more importantly, her sense that politics could aspire to some nobility, that leaders could have grace and dignity and remain above the partisan fray, and that those leaders could symbolize for us a kind of human grandeur. But not only nobility: she believed that one’s station conferred on one obligations, and one’s main obligation was to conduct oneself with the decorum fitting that station. In mom’s final years, only one person rivaled Trump as an object of her venom: Meghan Markle, who she regarded as a traitor.
I don’t think Trump’s policies bothered her much. Once, I interrupted one of her anti-Trump rants to request that next time we talked she tell me one good thing she thought Trump had done, or one characteristic about him that she admired. Averring that this would be impossible, she nonetheless conceded to the task, and next we met she expressed relief that he had not gotten us embroiled in any stupid foreign war. We agreed this was not an inconsequential matter.
A Calvinist appreciation for people who had made something of themselves, usually manifested in their wealth, accompanied my mom’s aristocratic tendencies. Granted, attention had to be duly paid to wealth’s corruptions, but her years of poverty had left her more than a little dazzled by its allure. Then, too, sitting next to rich people in her Christian Reformed pews helped mitigate her suspicions, making her realize that rich people did a lot of good things with their money. Still, many of our conversations had her condemn the sinfulness of ostentation, even as she would go into painstaking detail about exactly how impressive the ostentation was. She liked to tell people that she had seen something or been some place more than she enjoyed actually seeing the thing or having been there. Going through an art museum with her was an experience because it was more important to her to be able to say she had seen a Rembrandt than it was to contemplate the actual painting. She could simultaneously extol and disparage the value of something, but had a hard time thinking about things in any other terms.
She took great pride in the accomplishments of her children and grandchildren. She frequently, to my embarrassment, bragged about the fact she had a son who was a professor at Hope College, and no doubt bored her friends with details about my job. When I took the job at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation I feared her reaction. I need not have. After a few seconds of silence she said, “Who would have thought a poor peasant girl from Ferwerd would have a son who would work for a United States President?” I desisted from informing her that the president in question was, technically, no longer alive, but realized that for her, having lived through a depression and a World War where she had spent her teenage years under Nazi occupation, this symbolized The American Dream. And she was right. In America, being born to a particular station was not a life sentence, and the moral force of that truth was not lost on her. A poor immigrant woman could come to this country and watch and admire the ascent of her children and grandchildren, and their rise would make all the sacrifices worthwhile. She would frequently comment, in a tone both proud and condemnatory, on how much stuff her children and grandchildren had acquired. She never quite knew what to make of American materialism, in part because of her blindness to her own tendencies.
In West Michigan there is a game we play called “Dutch Bingo.” Whenever we find ourselves in conversation with someone with an obviously Dutch last name, we immediately attempt to discover persons with whom we have a mutual connection; barring that, to discuss known public figures of the community and start tracing their various connections through birth and marriage. It is a fun game and fairly innocent. I am not without skill at it, but my mom was a virtuoso. Anytime I told her I had “met” someone, I got the whole family history and, God willing, an ambivalent lingering on some more scandalous details, which she delivered by combining moralizing and the frisson of excitement that comes from being in the know. “That adulterous affair he had with his secretary was so sad and so hard on the family. Not many people know about that.” The relaying of detail may have indicated a distasteful pride in her own moral superiority, as well as demonstrating how embedded she was in a social network where knowledge was currency, but it was also a nod to the upholding of a moral code that alone could hold a community together.
She took some merciless though carefully disguised joy in laying the mighty low. I recall more than once her complaining that an expensive new mansion on the lakeshore was a sin, an observation she repeated as often as she admiringly drove past it. Her matter-of-fact but censorious delivery, often accompanied by a widening of the eyes and a pursing of the lips and a nod of the head, relieved her conscience of the sin of gossip, further exculpated by her strict moral judgments. I think Dutch Bingo played such an important role in my mom’s life because it helped her navigate the pressures of assimilation, particularly when she began losing her group identity. You could know who you were, or who other people were, if you could say where they were … that is, locate them within a thick social network. It also revealed the range of mom’s horizons, which substituted depth of perception for breadth. Underneath it, however, was the quintessential American pathology that both admired and suspected those who had “made it.”
I’ve come to think that in many ways my mom’s skill at this game indicated the full extent of her assimilation. She was not only interested in locating people horizontally along blood or other lines, but vertically in terms of their social status. She didn’t stop scratching her aristocratic itch at the highest governmental levels; it redounded all the way down. Her residual but plain-to-see love of human hierarchies brought into relief the way most Americans hid their tendency to do so behind egalitarian language. But she was never fooled by the way people tried to cut those at the top down to size, even if she was guilty herself; she inchoately understood the impulse at work. Sometimes it even generated sympathy in her; at least she could recognize that something was lost in the leveling.
My mom personified American status anxiety, but unencumbered by our egalitarian impulse. That made it pure, even if she never recognized it within herself. When I shared with her my observation that I thought her a monarchist, she did not treat that as an accusation. Most Americans would, having recognized early in our history the potential dangers of inherited wealth and status. Colonists rapidly passed laws against inheritance, and while these may have weakened the strengths of family, those laws were essential to fueling America’s massive economic engine.
This economic energy relates to the political and social energy unleashed by a democracy that sees every man as a king. Those who watched Oppenheimer are well aware that unleashing a new form of energy both creates and destroys, and Tocqueville in many ways saw democracy as a political nuclear bomb. The erosion of hierarchies and the concomitant inability to place ourselves vertically on the social scale, and the hyperactivity and mobility of Americans making it difficult to place ourselves horizontally, meant that Americans would constantly suffer not only from an identity crisis but also from status anxiety. That anxiety, in turn, would both result from and in intense and increased competition among democratic persons as they sought ways to show their worth, which required comparison to others likewise flattened out to the status of citizen. Tocqueville referred to this as the problem of resemblance: how we relate to each other when we assume we are all alike and equal. Democracy substituted for the more static hierarchies of the pre-modern world a dynamic hierarchy where those lower on the scale would, driven by resentment, try to cut those on the top down to size, while those on the top would zealously guard their place, which they pass on to their progeny. This is why the more elite the institution the greater the guilt about “privilege,” confessions of which disguise the fact that those who enjoy it have no intention of giving it up. Democracy thus introduced competition between the classes in place of mutual dependence. Unlike the noblesse oblige of the old system, the new one would rip apart the social fabric by placing the classes in perpetual conflict with each other.
The continued existence of social and economic classes, their relations now marked by envy and resentment on one side and contempt and smugness (resulting from the conviction of those on top that they earned their place) on the other, would place under the democratic experiment a tumultuous foundation, and the tremors of that would be felt by all, even if they weren’t fully cognizant of how the ground was constantly shaking under their feet. In an egalitarian democracy, anyone enjoying social or economic success must answer to those less successful, who will have to justify to themselves their lower status and will thus in turn attribute the success of others to either dumb luck or hidden vice. Comparison, which always accompanied resemblance, would rob them of joy and comity.
This essential insight of Tocqueville’s extended long-standing worries concerning the inherent instability of democratic regimes. In the aristocracies of old, people might have gotten to power through accidents of birth, but power, once held, was disguised and made gentle by the decorum of the court. The common people would have an uneasy relationship with “aristocratic refinement” and the “air of grandeur that prevents it from being communicated,” but they’d respect that the drapery of “elegant manners, refined tastes, and graceful phrases” would cover the “depravity of great noblemen.” Mom hated hearing salacious details about the Kennedy boys.
Tocqueville further contrasted aristocratic refinement with democratic societies and their apparently open access to power and wealth, meaning that citizens would always look askance at those who achieved those things, wondering what sorts of vicious machinations were at play, for “there is less reason to fear the sight of the immorality of the great than that of immorality leading to greatness.”
Mutual comparison is the fly in the ointment of democracy, and democratic citizens would always be suspicious of fellow citizens who rose through the ranks. They would “wonder how he who was their equal yesterday has today won the right to command them,” and since attributing “his rise to his talents or his virtues is inconvenient, for it means admitting that they are less virtuous or capable than he,” they would assume the rise resulted from vice and not virtue. Mutual comparison leads to universal suspicion. The impulse to compare creates a permanent faultline in our politics, for the divisions in social and economic classes would now require an explanation, and those would rarely be charitable.
Tocqueville thus made the counter-intuitive claim that class divisions were more intractable in democracies than they were in aristocracies. The acids of comparison eroded the strength of the chains that bound the classes together, and those acids intensified precisely because of the mobility between classes. Class members now became contemptuous of those in other classes, envious of success, and dismissive of failure. Everyone ended up where they were in the social hierarchy either through their merits or their weakness. Mutual dependency between the classes was displaced by rivalry. “Aristocratic institutions have the effect of linking each man closely” with others and defining their obligations to everyone regardless of status. Their stations may be fixed, but the duties are fluid, while in democracies the stations are fluid but “devoted service to any individual much rarer.” In democracies, Tocqueville argued, “the bonds of human affection are wider but more relaxed” and “the woof of time is ever being broken and the tack of past generations lost.” Life in an “aristocracy links everyone, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link.” Tocqueville saw that the breaking of this chain unbound the generations from one another, leading us “to forget our ancestors” and “cloud our view of our descendants.” We’d be living for ourselves, in the moment.
Likewise, the great Irish thinker Edmund Burke worried about the dissolution of the chains that would bind the high to the low and the past and future to the present. He fretted, in the wake of the French Revolution, about the corrosion of those chains, about the dissolution of the “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Once the links that connect the lower with the higher and the visible to the invisible world were removed, we would not only be placed in a permanent identity crisis, but we would lose our sense of both purpose and duty.
My mom managed to hold her aristocratic impulses in tension with democratic principles. She typically supported candidates she respected because of their apparent dignity, or those she knew personally to be “good people.” She didn’t have any party allegiances and paid little attention to policy; her political interests attached to how candidates carried themselves. I think she understood politics as part of this Burkean partnership, and so she simply wanted to know if someone could be a good and trustworthy partner. How else could we build a stable world? Given my mom’s life-story, stability meant everything to her, and unstable characters made for a chaotic world. My mom loved order, testified to by the spotless cleanliness of her home. Democracy’s messiness unnerved her.
She was no political philosopher, but mom understood that we had duties to one another regardless of status, and that she was a link in the chain that held together the generations. In her last days, her thoughts were often occupied about the world and people in the Netherlands she had left behind in her youthful immigration and the people — her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren — she would be leaving behind in her death. She felt deeply and lamented loudly the inevitable end of the love she had for us. Perhaps she worried whether she had done enough to earn the rest from that which obligation had placed upon her. Perhaps she wondered whether the chain would hold after her time linking it had ended. I hope that in her last days she knew the peace that comes from knowing that the chain didn't break on her watch, even if immigration had effected a severing from her ancestors. Now she experiences that final and ultimate equality that comes to us all in death, but for her family and loved ones, she hasn't lost her vote.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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