America has always battled the uniquely European notion that it was unsophisticated, a land of hicks and fanatics. Dr. Samuel Johnson, foremost British wit, called Americans “a race of convicts,” and added, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.” French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was even more dismissive of America as “a country with thirty-two religions and only one dish.”
But of all the critics who have ventured to speak on American politics, none has been so farsighted as Alexis de Tocqueville. His journey in 1831 to the United States began as a trade mission with the stated goal of investigating the American prison system. When he returned to France the following year, he brought back with him the seeds of one of the greatest political works ever written: Democracy in America.
Tocqueville illuminated the great freedoms guarded by the American republic in its early period and warned of how they could be lost. His analysis foreshadows the dangers our nation faces now.
Political commentator Michael Barone skillfully revisits the work of Alexis de Tocqueville and reminds us of what the American experiment looked like in its early decades. Barone shows us how Tocqueville accurately captured our unique American spirit and how this spirit continues to be manifest in our nation today.
Michael Barone is the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Barone is the principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics, published by National Journal every two years. He is also the author of a number of other books, including Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan and Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics. He has written for many major market publications, including the Economist, the Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sunday Times of London. He is also a contributor to Fox News Channel. Previously, Barone served as a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, a senior staff editor at Reader’s Digest, and a member of the editorial page staff for the Washington Post. He graduated from Harvard College (1966) and Yale Law School (1969), and was an editor of the Harvard Crimson and the Yale Law Journal.