Hyperdemocracy in America: Tocquevillian Perspectives on the Democratic Crisis

While crisis has been a prominent theme in commentary on democratic politics of late, under generic headings such as ‘populism’, it is in the United States (where indeed the phenomenon of populism originated) that the crisis is most visible. Hence there is need for analysis which captures the specificity of this case without obscuring its more general theoretical implications. A model for such an approach is Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The present crisis is multidimensional, but a unifying feature is its epistemic character: it arises from the complex and contested relationship between knowledge and democracy. We can see it as the extension of the democratic principle that people should make up their own minds into an arena not previously (except in the case of ‘freedom of conscience’) thought subject to it: to the production and acceptance of facts. Facts such as the result of a presidential election or the efficacy of a vaccine against a deadly pandemic disease strike one immediately as emblematic of this novel problem, dwarfing even the issues examined under the heading of ‘post-truth’ several years ago. Epistemic questions also underlie current concerns about both broadcast and social media. Democratic theory is no longer dominated by the optimistic theory of ‘cognitive mobilization’, whereby rising education and more rapidly circulating information would extend and entrench democracy. But it is not yet clear what paradigm should succeed it. While Tocqueville’s most famous doubt, about democracy’s ‘tyranny of the majority’, merely restated classical fears of demagoguery, his principal explanatory factor ‘equality of condition’ yielded more original insights. Its strong epistemic dimension is illustrated in Tocqueville’s famous formulation of his project, ‘When I compare the Greek and Roman republics to these republics of America, the manuscript libraries of the first and their coarse populace, to the thousand newspapers that crisscross the second and the enlightened people who inhabit them … I am tempted to burn my books so as to apply only new ideas to a social state so new.’ Juxtaposing today’s far more massive flow of information with the political coarseness seen on 6 January 2021, we see the need for further innovation, but here too Tocqueville offers cues: ‘there is a sort of ignorance that is born of extreme publicity. In despotic states men do not know how to act because they are told nothing; in democratic nations they often act at random because they are told everything’. Much has changed that Tocqueville could not anticipate, in the fields of media, science, religion and jurisprudence that constitute the epistemic dimension of democracy. But his view of democracy as a complex and emergent socio-political (and not merely governmental) phenomenon, containing its own contradictions and resulting dynamics, is a model for a similarly broad rethinking of democratic theory today. Developing arguments I made in my book Hyperdemocracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), I focus on Tocqueville in order to examine the democratic roots of the present crisis of democracy, and to assess the extent to which the American case is exemplary.