Democracy in action and the obnoxious

Don't get too outraged, those of you who are looking down your noses at those unreasonable, misinformed anti-healthcare-reform town hallers. No matter what particular clan, tribe or party you belong to, you can't really disown them any more than you can your own grandmother. You may not agree with them, but their brand of hotheaded, self-righteous, obnoxious, stick-it-to-the-manism is as American as apple pie.

Earlier this summer, I decided to reread Alexis de Tocqueville's 19th century classic, "Democracy in America." I came away from the two-volume masterpiece with a picture of Americans as a bunch of agitated, coarse, boisterous, disrespectful know-it-alls. Mind you, Tocqueville had no intention of insulting us. It's just that, in the course of describing an ambitious, creative, forward-thinking people who were destined to change the course of history, the French aristocrat also illuminated the underbelly of the ideology of equality.

Granted, a lot has changed since Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s. But as I made my way through the pages, I was nonetheless astonished that, despite the millions upon millions of immigrants who've arrived on these shores in the intervening years and in spite of the ineluctable evolution of the native born, the essential character of the U.S. has remained constant. Tocqueville would undoubtedly argue that that's because the core ideology of democracy and equality have continued to shape the national character.

In Volume Two, he describes what the belief in equality of men does to people. Not only do they "seldom take the opinion of their equal, a man like themselves, upon trust," but they don't much countenance the idea that anyone can actually know more than they do. As a result, "the general notion of the intellectual superiority which any man whatsoever may acquire in relation to the rest of the community is ... overshadowed" by everyone else pooh-poohing the so-called experts.

That's because the equal footing we'd like to believe we all live on leads us to believe that we can figure things out for ourselves. We are, in Tocqueville's biting phrase, "constantly brought back to [our] own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth." Everyone "shuts himself up in his own breast, and affects from that point to judge the world."