Alexis de Tocqueville came from France and traveled across the United States in 1831, and several years later published his reflections about Americans and America in the classic Democracy in America. In volume 2, published in 1840, he titled Chapter 13, “Why the Americans Appear So Restless Amid Their Well-Being.” In the chapter, he meditates on why the Americans, many of whom seem so very well-off by the French standards of the time, nonetheless often seem so restless and melancholy. He points to a combination of materialism, the opportunities for economic and mobility that lead to fear of missing out, and the way in which a desire for equality can sharpen itself and strengthen these other factors.
As the US approaches Election Day tomorrow, Tocqueville offers food for reflection. In particular, I’ve long been intrigued by his comment: “When inequality is the common law of a society, the greatest inequalities do not strike the eye. When all is nearly level, the least inequalities offend it. This is why the desire for equality always becomes more insatiable as equality is greater.” Here’s a longer passage:
It is a strange thing to see with what kind of feverish ardor the Americans pursue well-being, and how they appear tormented constantly by a vague fear of not having chosen the shortest road that can lead to it. The inhabitant of the United States is attached to the goods of this world, as if he was assured of not dying, and he hastens so much to seize those goods that pass within his reach, that you would say that at every instant he is afraid of ceasing to live before enjoying them. He seizes all of them, but without gripping them, and he soon lets them escape from his hands in order to run after new enjoyments.
A man, in the United States, carefully builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it while the ridgepole is being set; he plants a garden and he rents it as he is about to taste its fruits; he clears a field, and he leaves to others the trouble of gathering the harvest. He embraces a profession, and he leaves it. He settles in a place that he soon leaves in order to carry his changing desires elsewhere. If his private affairs give him some respite, he immediately plunges into the whirl of politics. And when, near the end of a year filled with work, he still has a little leisure, he takes his restless curiosity here and there across the vast limits of the United States. He will do as much as five hundred leagues in a few days in order to distract himself better from his happiness. …
Equality leads by a still more direct road toward several of the effects that I have just described. When all the prerogatives of birth and fortune are destroyed, when all the professions are open to everyone, and when you can reach the summit of each one of them on your own, an immense and easy career seems to open before the ambition of men, and they readily imagine that they are called to great destinies. But that is an erroneous view that experience corrects every day.
The same equality that allows each citizen to conceive vast hopes makes all citizens individually weak. It limits their strengths on all sides, at the same time that it allows their desires to expand. Not only are they powerless by themselves, but also they find at each step immense obstacles that they had not at first noticed. They destroyed the annoying privileges of a few of their fellows; they encounter the competition of all. The boundary marker has changed form rather than place. When men are more or less similar and follow the same road, it is very difficult for any one of them to march quickly and cut through the uniform crowd that surrounds and crushes him. This constant opposition that reigns between the instincts given birth by equality and the means that equality provides to satisfy them torments and fatigues souls.
You can imagine men having arrived at a certain degree of liberty that satisfies them entirely. They then enjoy their independence without restlessness and without fervor. But men will never establish an equality that is enough for them. Whatever efforts a people may make, it will not succeed in making conditions perfectly equal within it; and if it had the misfortune to arrive at this absolute and complete leveling, there would still be inequality of intelligence that, coming directly from God, will always escape the laws. No matter how democratic the social state and political constitution of a people, you can therefore count on each of its citizens always seeing near himself several points that are above him, and you can predict that he will obstinately turn his attention solely in their direction. When inequality is the common law of a society, the greatest inequalities do not strike the eye. When all is nearly level, the least inequalities offend it. This is why the desire for equality always becomes more insatiable as equality is greater.
Among democratic peoples, men easily gain a certain equality; they cannot attain the equality they desire. The latter retreats from them every day, but without ever hiding from their view, and by withdrawing, it draws them in pursuit. They constantly believe that they are about to grasp it, and it constantly escapes their grip. They see it close enough to know its charms, they do not come close enough to enjoy it, and they die before having fully savored its sweet pleasures.
It is to these causes that you must attribute the singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic countries often reveal amid their abundance, and this disgust for life that sometimes comes to seize them in the middle of a comfortable and tranquil existence.
A number of Tocqueville’s themes about American restlessness continue to ring true to me: a drive for higher consumption, “a vague fear of not having chosen the shortest road that can lead to it,” and how people are “always seeing near himself several points that are above him.” The drive for “equality” sometimes seems to me to have stronger element of pulling down those with higher incomes and wealth (which I favor in mild doses) rather than of helping those with the lowest income and opportunities (which I would favor in large doses). In certain settings, even a factual statement that American have a high average standard of living by world standards can be met with virulent and even profane disagreement. The fluidity, ambition, and plenty that characterize the United States are also part of what makes Americans susceptible to the overpromising and bombast of politicians.
