After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy

by Chilton Williamson

The End of Democracy? The fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Iron Curtain. The Orange Revolution. The Arab Spring. The rush of events in recent decades seems to confirm that Alexis de Tocqueville was the future belongs to democracy. But take a closer look. The history of democracy since the 1830s, when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America , reveals a far more complicated picture. And the future, author Chilton Williamson Jr. demonstrates, appears rather unpromising for democratic institutions around the world. The fall of communism sparked the popular notion that the spread of democracy was inevitable. After Tocqueville challenges this sunny notion. Various aspects of twenty-first-century life that Tocqueville could scarcely have imagined—political, economic, social, religious, intellectual, technological, environmental—militate against democracy, both in developing societies and in the supposedly democratic West. This piercing, elegantly written book raises crucial questions about the future of democracy, •Just what is democracy? As Williamson shows, definitions and concepts have become so varied that the term is effectively meaningless.
•How does a system whose institutions and habits arose in small-scale societies adapt to a postmodern, globalized world?
•After two centuries of democratization, are Western countries really more free ?
•How can democracy endure when people care more about procuring what they want than about securing liberty?
•How does a political system survive when it is beset by problems that cannot be solved by political means?
Two decades ago, Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced the “end of history.” History, it turns out, is still very much with us. Democracy (whatever it is) may not be in the decades and centuries to come.

Genres: Politics

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 29, 2012

About the author

Chilton Williamson, Jr. was born in New York City and raised there and on the family farm near South Windham, Vermont where he acquired a lifelong love of nature and of the outdoors, horses, fishing, and hunting.

At Columbia College, he majored in European History and studied voice privately for some years, training to become an operatic tenor. Having given up a musical career, Williamson did four years of graduate work in American history at Columbia before becoming History Editor for St. Martin's Press in New York. During his three years with St. Martin's, he contributed numerous essays and book reviews to many publications, including Harper's, The New Republic, National Review, Commonweal, and The Nation.

In 1976 Williamson became Literary Editor (later Senior Editor) for National Review. The following year he moved to Block Island, Rhode Island, where he spent an isolated winter, gathering material for his first book (Saltbound: A Block Island Winter: Methuen, 1980) and commuting every other week to the magazine offices in New York. In Saltbound, Williamson interwines the history of the island from colonial days down to the present with a narrative account of his own experiences and adventures to depict an isolated traditional community transformed over three centuries by the forces of modernization and "progress."

Williamson moved to Kemmerer, Wyoming in the summer of 1979 to begin work on what he originally planned as the Western equivalent of Saltbound. Still on the payroll of National Review, commuting bi-monthly to his office in New York for four days at a time, he went to work with a crew on a drilling rig in the famous Overthrust Belt, in those days the symbol of the Energy Boom, the Sagebrush Rebellion, and the New West. From his lodgings in the Regency Apartments in Kemmerer, Williamson edited his reviews section, wrote his columns, worked long hours as a rigger and afterward at his desk making notes of all he had seen and heard that day, and completed his education as an outdoorsman begun years before in Vermont. By paying close attention to experienced people who had something to teach him, he learned to shoot a rifle fast and with accuracy, to navigate and survive in the backcountry, to break his own horses and train them to the mountain trails, load a packhorse, and butcher and pack big game. The literary result of his first year in the Rocky Mountain West is Roughnecking It: Or, Life in the Overthrust (Simon & Schuster, 1982): a thoroughly reprehensible work that has been described as a "kickass" book. Inspired by Mark Twain's classic, Roughing It, the book's theme is how the New West was foreshadowed by the Old, and how the Old West lingers on in the New. Roughnecking It was excellently reviewed, and is said to have found its way into the syllabus of a University of Wyoming course devoted to the study of social problems in Wyoming. Best of all, from the author's point of view, it won acceptance in the West as a kind of Oilriggers' Bible. Though presently out of print, it is still in demand by oilpatch veterans twenty-four years after its publication.

Williamson made his permanent residence in Kemmerer after arranging with National Review to become a long-distance editor and contributor, working from his home. In 1989 he left NR for a similar position at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. Early in 1994, Williamson inaugurated a regular Chronicles column, "The Hundredth Meridian," that continues today. Here he has recorded, for more than a decade now, espisodes from his life and adventures as a Westerner-hunting, fishing, horsepacking, backpacking, pushing cattle, breaking horses-and his travels throughout the West, in particular the southwest and northern Mexico and including the great Indian reservations where he has many friends and acquaintances. (The first twenty-two columns, deliberately planned as a serial book, have recentl

Reviews

[The American Conservative]

'In After Tocqueville, the conservative man of letters Chilton Williamson Jr. sets out to analyze Tocqueville’s insights and the prospects for democracy in a world marked by centralization, bureaucratization, moral relativism, and the full torrent of what Walter Lippmann called the “acids of modernity.”'

Read the full review, "Don't Despair of Democracy," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent!