“Everything goes when anything goes all of the time.”
—Paul Westerberg

Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America (1835/40) that upon the advent of written constitutions and electoral politics, the aristocracies of the Western world had to rediscover their purpose. He saw the United States as the most acute example of a society in which the contrarian skills, powers, and attitudes of a caste of nobles—useful in the old medieval regime—had been eclipsed by egalitarianism. But this eclipse, or transit, as it were, created the need for new brakes against the tyrannical tendencies of governments and the misguided urges of the masses. Tocqueville spent hundreds of pages reviewing possible sources of resistance. Lawyers, women, artists, soldiers, entrepreneurs, and religious leaders would all be called upon to push back against the self-centered madness of the mob and its populist leaders.

The French count argued that because people in aristocracies had fixed places in their social hierarchies, they didn’t suffer as much from the urge to conform to the values of everyone else around them. A carpenter, lieutenant, merchant, friar, or marquise might look to his colleagues for how to think and behave, but it made no sense for him to imitate other groups to which he would never belong. Thus, Tocqueville unveiled a critical paradox: by eliminating castes, modern democracy unleashes the tyranny of public opinion. And that opinion is how fanatical egalitarianism threatens personal liberty. By implication, a one-off vote to install a despotic regime in a fake democracy like Russia, China, or Cuba reflects already flawed social conditions. Such regimes are tragic but predictable. Far more worrisome is that even a mature democracy—one that defends liberty in its laws and constitutions—tends to repress individuality. It’s just that the mechanisms are more subtle; they’re social and habitual rather than legal or authoritarian. And their lack of visibility is what makes them so sinister. They often cloak themselves in the rhetoric and symbols of freedom, democracy, and the public good.

The pressure to conform to the juvenile morality of the masses is not new. It’s the stuff of political nightmares from Thucydides and Tacitus to Ortega and Orwell.

Echoing Burke and Jefferson—and anticipating Mill—Tocqueville’s book remains the most detailed and wide-ranging assessment of the risks that democracy poses to the personal liberty previously defended by self-interested aristocratic elites. The issue is magnified in nations where democracy achieves cult-like status. I call such countries “hyper democracies” because they suffer from excess idealism regarding equality.

Today, citizens in the U.S., Canada, England, France, and Spain are blind to the dangers of conformism because they instinctively deem its antidotes undemocratic and immoral. To them, it seems paradoxical and irrational that democracy needs checks because otherwise it short-circuits itself and turns into the very tyranny it despises.

Within thriving and stable democratic nations there’s an even more subtle structural threat related to wealth and technological success. Tocqueville touches on this, but readers tend to miss it. Recent experience has shown that a problem with the newly baptized aristocratic elites of a powerful democracy like the U.S. is their susceptibility to “career capture.” This mimics how politicians use “regulatory capture” to extract money and obedience from corporations and professional associations. By forming a committee to regulate some part of the economy, such organizations emerge from the woodwork and do whatever it takes to preserve their power and prestige. They’re induced to lobby the committee and bribe its members with campaign funds.

To maintain their status and income, most individuals behave just like those corporations and associations. Indeed, “career capture” is the deeper cause of “regulatory capture.” And can we blame them? I’m not so sure anymore. Whose baby doesn’t need a new pair of shoes?

So, when governments and political activists take over media platforms, high-profile businesses, universities, colleges, and clubs, the elites that populate such institutions can’t help but embrace the new ideology being foisted on them. The stakes are too high. The owners and managers of multibillion-dollar companies, the administrators and professors at Ivy League universities, the scientists and doctors who’ve spent fifteen years of their lives obtaining credentials, licenses, and grants—such people aren’t likely to think independently or take stands on principle. The same difficulty infects government agencies. How long and how much training, certification, and ass-kissing does it take to climb to the top of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Centers for Disease Control, or Secret Service? Is it any wonder these are now the most corrupt agencies on the planet?

We have an anatomy of the decay of an aging democratic nation. Conforming to incompetence and corruption gets normalized when a society and its government are blessed—or plagued—by the large and successful institutions that make their individual members powerful and wealthy. Such organizations depend on an internally perverted “network of mistrust” based on everyone’s shared fear of the honesty and morality that might bring serious reform. This is because good people expose the perils of groupthink, thereby destroying the political, cultural, and professional capital that everyone else has worked so long to accumulate. Thus, institutions promote complicity in their own abuses. Such complicity is both mutually recognized and unconscious.

This thesis was advanced by the now rightly fashionable economic theorist Ludwig von Mises. In one of his lesser-known books—Socialism (1922)—he described how the more socialist a nation becomes, the more a desire for political conformity replaces merit, ability, and work to attain wealth and power. And the process is reciprocal: the more a nation requires political conformity from its citizens, the more it transforms into a socialist nightmare.

In this light, a dysfunctional bureaucracy is the essence of socialism, and vice versa.

Large institutions and collectivist ideologies work together. Even libertarians forget that this moral case for antitrust legislation cannot be held apart from the case for efficiency. Without competition, institutions will become dystopian and immoral. By contrast, an anti-institutional morality provides a kind of efficiency. Modern America is a kakistocracy due of the tyranny of political correctness and language policing that took hold in the 1970s.

Spy agencies, health departments, national police forces, and government attorneys have become so powerful that they routinely destroy their political enemies by framing them, arresting them, and suing them into submission. Educational institutions, large corporations, and professional organizations provide a supporting network of social conditions and ideologies for our government masters with whom they share their values even as they fear their wrath. Cancel culture and wokeness—new versions of political correctness—thrive in this atmosphere.

Louis XIV paved the way for something similar by centralizing power in France at the end of the seventeenth century. He domesticated French aristocrats by ordering them to live at Versailles and turning them into helpless patrons. Napoleons I and III were inevitable outcomes. Today, in the U.S., our natural replacements for the English aristocracy against which we once rebelled have been recaptured by our central government. We have met the enemy, and it is us.

This is why U.S. elites must be chastened with a rigorous brand of populist idealism, and often. It’s also why we’re back to a Tocquevillian paradox. This particular type of populism is the essence of American honor and patriotism. It’s unlike European nationalism, which is often driven by ethnic pride. Rather, it’s supposed to be based on the idea of personal freedom as the negation of government power. Like all democracies, America requires political parties. The difference is that in America, one party must be the anti-bureaucracy party, the anti-socialist party.

Politics must decentralize power. Otherwise, corruption will prevail, and personal freedom will die. When that happens in a country as powerful as the U.S., the effects can be global and devastating.

Image by Salvador Dalí, Freudian Portrait of a Bureaucrat (1936)