postmodern putin’s Reviews > Democracy in America > Status Update

In democratic nations, men will attain a certain degree of equality with ease without being able to reach the one they crave. This retreats daily before them without moving out of their sight; even as it recedes, it draws them after it. They never cease believing that they are about to grasp it, while it never ceases to elude their grasp.

Choose any American at random and he should be a man of burning desires, full of initiative, enterprising, and, above all, an innovator. In fact, this outlook permeates all his works, enters his political laws, his religious doctrines, his theories of social economy, and his domestic occupations; he carries it everywhere with him, deep in the woods as in the heart of his cities.

I see other peoples of America enjoying the same physical conditions of prosperity as the Anglo-Americans but without their laws and customs, and these nations are miserable. Anglo-American laws and customs represent, therefore, the particular and predominant reason, which I have been seeking, for their greatness.

Americans so completely identify the spirit of Christianity with freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive the one without the other; and this is not one of those sterile ideas bequeathed by the past to the present nor one which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

In the lucky circumstances which have supported and confirmed the establishment and continuance of the democratic republic in the United States, the most important is the choice of the country itself which Americans inhabit. Their fathers have given them the love of equality and freedom but it was God himself who granted them the means of long remaining equal and free by his gift of this boundless continent.

There exists a patriotism which springs mainly from that instinctive, disinterested, and indefinable feeling which binds a man's heart to his birthplace. This unreflecting love blends with the liking for ancient customs, respect for ancestors, and the memories of the past. Those who experience it cherish their homeland as they love their father's house.

Two main dangers threaten the existence of democracies: namely, the entire subservience of the legislature to the will of the electorate and the concentration of all the other powers of government in the legislature.

The legislators of the states have encouraged the development of these dangers. Those of the Union have done their utmost to make them less of a threat.