For nearly 200 years now, Alexis de Tocqueville has been our surest guide to understanding the character and trajectory of the American experiment in liberal democracy. 

While Tocqueville is often cited for his positive assessments of American democracy, his work offers stark warnings as well. Tocqueville was perhaps the first to understand and articulate clearly the bargain of democracy which traded the instability of the coarseness of the mob and the nobility and dignity of the aristocracy for a more uniform triviality of manners and pettiness of everyday life. Later critics of modern democracies from G.K. Chesterton and Aldous Huxley to T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk have decried this exchange arguing, in essence, that such a bargain deprives men of the full range of what it means to be human, and thus of the resources to fashion a truly humane society.

Tocqueville put it best when he argued that the benevolent, universalizing and centralized power of modern democracy will “cover the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform” until man’s will “is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided.”  By this process, society “is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd” of an “innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.”  This form of total control is “combined more easily than is commonly believed” with “outward forms of freedom” and can even be established under the “sovereignty of the people.”

For those of us living in 21^st Century America, this passage has a chilling air of the prophetic.  Examples abound, but two recent news items here in Kansas are sufficient to demonstrate Tocqueville’s thesis. Last month Governor Sebelius announced the formation of the “Kansas Innovation Consortium.” The Consortium was described as consisting of a “powerhouse lineup” of corporate leaders formed to help promote the ubiquitous thing called “economic development” in Kansas. Sebelius described the Consortium’s role as taking a “strategic look at the future.”  The co-chair of the Consortium said she hoped the group would “shape the future of the state.” Whatever this means, it is emphatically not the case that this sinister-sounding Consortium between the far-reaching power of the state and the powerhouse lineup of corporate bosses means more freedom and self-determination for ordinary Kansas citizens.

Similarly, last month in defending the exclusive prerogative of Kansas lawyers to select judges for our state’s highest courts, the president of the Kansas bar, Linda Parks, scoffed at the notion that this system might offend ordinary folks. Parks employed the standard shield of “judicial independence” to keep regular people out of the selection process and declared that lawyers are not a “special interest group” because of their diversity of opinions and views. It is difficult to completely describe the perniciousness of this view, but let it suffice to say it would be difficult to imagine Ms. Parks employing the same logic to restrict political control to, say, land-owning white men. 

Ms. Parks goes on to describe objections to the current system of lawyer control as “lawyer bashing,” to which the only appropriate response may be that there is a good reason lawyer bashing has such a strong pedigree in historically free societies.

All of this raises the question most pressing on us now; a question that violates the PC codes of all the major political powers of our day: Are we free? For in fact, what Tocqueville was describing is what has been called by one eminent political philosopher the “swindle of consent.” 

We live in the shadow of many masters—there are the tax masters, the monied masters, the loan officer and the payroll clerk; the town inspector, the county inspector, the state inspector, the code enforcer and the permit doler; there is the dog catcher and the license examiner and even the busy-body do-gooder from the heart and lung association who snubs out our cigarettes with one hand while paying her registered lobbyist with the other; there are the ad men and experts of all colors and stripes telling us what to buy, what to eat, what to read, and what to believe; there are the snooty professors and the imported school superintendents; the shipping barons, the oil barons, the corn barons, the food scientists, the Wal-Mart feeding trough, and the health care gods; the economic planners and the few who select our judicial masters.  And once consent to these masters is given, opting out is rarely an easy (or legal) option.  

Still, it has not always been so. American democracy, and Kansas in particular, has always been leavened by the Jeffersonian spirit of the small-hold freeman, the yeoman farmer, the independent small merchant, the frontiersman, the prairie populists, the lover of liberty who—with his sturdy virtues born of necessity and struggle and scarcity—became self-sufficient, caring and doing for himself, his family, and his community. This is also our heritage, yet it is in danger of becoming a museum set piece.  

Barack Obama recently elicited conservative rage by describing rural and small town Americans as bitter and clinging for succor to God, guns, and xenophobia. While Obama does a tremendous disservice to those he caricatures, his critics do likewise when they pretend that no such resentment exists. In fact, such resentment is real, but it does not stem from the lack of state or federal handouts, but rather from the very real lack of power ordinary citizens are experiencing. 

Where does that leave us? With the difficult job of recovering the sturdy Jeffersonian virtues of the freeman—virtues of thrift, being rooted in one’s place, hard work, pride of ownership, the orderly use of time, fierce independence of spirit, self-sufficiency, charity towards one’s neighbor, a refusal to bend the knee to any master, membership in a communal identity, and a return to family economies that place a strong incentive on having children. 

This is what has been called the Country Party. In the agrarian thinker Ralph Borsodi’s terms, membership in the Country Party represents a level of freedom and independence far greater than that created by “the infinitesimal fraction of political power represented by a vote.”

Kansas Liberty columnist Caleb Stegall is a lawyer and writer in Perry, Kansas.  His book on the history of prairie populism in Kansas is forthcoming from ISI Books in 2009.

Contact  caleb.stegall@kansasliberty.com