In the last lines of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville says that in writing the book, “I did not mean either to serve or to contest any party; I undertook to see, not differently, but further than the parties; and while they are occupied with the next day, I wanted to ponder the future.”

　　Seeing further than the prevailing culture is often difficult. Today, technology encourages us to live like Dominic Toretto in The Fast and the Furious, “a quarter mile at a time,” focused on the next swipe, the next click, the next headline in a nanosecond news cycle. The pressing demands of COVID, an unstable job market, and an inflationary economy have absorbed our attention in recent years. But without seeing further, contemplating the longer term, the future falls apart. How do we avert this?

　　To Tocqueville, the tendency toward immersion in the immediate is part of the nature of democracy. Unlike aristocracies, democracies have no inherited classes to provide generational continuity. Anyone’s fortune can plummet with a few bad investments or career moves. Social ranks and roles are often transient, unstable, precarious, and fleeting. Thus “everyone is constantly striving to change his position,” says Tocqueville. This forces individuals to engage in a perpetual scramble to establish and maintain their place in society, a foothold in an unstable world.

　　On the positive side, however, Tocqueville observed that the dynamic social order of democracies can unleash great economic energy, which can be extremely productive. Removing class barriers to competition can encourage people to hustle. And compared to the elitism of aristocracies, democracies allow a much wider range of citizens to contribute their personal ingenuity to society.

　　But life in a social order that encourages perpetual, and often frenzied, competition takes a psychological toll. It nudges people toward impulsiveness and an obsession with the moment. As Tocqueville puts it, in democracy the “instability of society itself fosters the natural instability of mans desires. In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than tomorrow.”

　　This tendency to look “no further than tomorrow” helps to explain why Western democracies often elevate causes of the moment to religious significance, like some forms of ethnic nationalism, social justice, and environmentalism. It also gives context to our cultural habits of continually updating our CVs, defining and redefining our “identities,” and sculpting our “personal brands,” as we broadcast our place in society at the current instant. By contrast, in aristocracies, citizens inherit an established personal brand of sorts, predetermined by their family name, title, and rank. While a more prescribed and fixed identity perhaps can limit their options, there are benefits to having earthly questions of status and identity settled from birth. It can leave people freer to focus on the longer term.

　　Tocqueville notes that among the many social forces, one provides the most powerful counterbalance to the sometimes-pathological pull of immediacy in democracies. Religion is strong precisely where the democratic soul is weak. Religion wrenches the mind away from the scrambles of the moment and points it toward the eternal. Tocqueville finds that highly religious democracies have an ingrained collective habit of long-term thinking and that this habit spills over into their approach to worldly affairs:

　　In the ages of faith the final end of life is placed beyond life. The men of those ages therefore naturally, and in a manner involuntarily, accustom themselves to fix their gaze for a long course of years on some immovable object, towards which they are constantly tending; and they learn by insensible degrees to repress a multitude of petty passing desires, in order to be the better able to content that great and lasting desire which possesses them. When these same men engage in the affairs of this world, the same habits may be traced in their conduct.

　　Here, Tocqueville observes how religious thought encourages people to contemplate greater aims on the distant horizon, which they form a habit of prioritizing and pursuing over the endless temptations of the instant. This idea was echoed by Edmund Burke, who wrote that leaders “should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination, that their hope should be full of immortality, that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence in the permanent part of their nature, and to a permanent fame and glory in the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world.” Conversely, societies marked by an absence or weakness of religion suffer from shortsightedness. Their lack of long-term vision leaves them far more prone to getting caught up in the “multitude of petty passing desires.”

　　Besides religion, governments can also promote long-term vision by maintaining the stability and continuity of laws and institutions, so that citizens have a reliable framework in which to plan further than tomorrow. Burke criticized those who are overeager to tear up existing political systems, such as institutions and laws protecting property rights, without considering how this affects citizens’ ability to project and design their own future. The more the future is uncertain, the more it becomes impossible to know how to raise children:

　　[When leaders] think it among their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society … Nothing stable in the modes of holding property or exercising function could form a solid ground on which any parent could speculate in the education of his offspring or in a choice for their future establishment in the world. No principles would be early worked into the habits. As soon as the most able instructor had completed his laborious course of institution, instead of sending forth his pupil, accomplished in a virtuous discipline, fitted to procure him attention and respect in his place in society, he would find everything altered, and that he had turned out a poor creature to the contempt and derision of the world, ignorant of the true grounds of estimation.

　　Here, Burke observes that dismantling the systems that underpin society destabilizes both “holding property” and “exercising function” or one’s “place in society,” i.e. jobs and other social roles. These changes throw the future up in the air, making it difficult to establish and aim at goals. For example, Venezuela obliterated property rights by nationalizing industries from oil and mining to farms, banking, retail stores, transportation, electricity, and even tourism and travel. Doing so destroyed or made ineffective a multitude of private leadership roles, including executives, entrepreneurs, and farm owners. This left millions without roles to educate and prepare themselves for, and without property and businesses to own, grow, invest in, and pass on. In short, they no longer had a chance to navigate the long term in their own lives. Moreover, as Aristotle observed in Politics, private property is a prerequisite for private generosity. When the state expropriates private property, it takes a monopoly on generosity. This leaves private citizens unable to promote the long-term prosperity of their community through giving. And where state generosity cannot provide, and private generosity is impossible, the desperate who fall through the cracks are left to steal. This helps explain why Venezuela has the highest crime rate in the world.

　　Another way to promote long-term thinking is to promote the stability of the economy and the social order.

　　But Burke’s observation, that tearing up the “original fabric” of social systems undermines citizens’ ability to prepare for the future, has also played out in a series of sweeping changes to the US job market over the past half-century. America gutted many of its vocational training programs in the 1970s, destabilizing the future of a whole critical category of the workforce. Innovation, automation, and outsourcing have made many degrees and skills marketable one day and unmarketable the next. DEI tore up the fabric of hiring and admissions criteria. All this has left many feeling they do not know what or where to study, whether a degree is worth it, or what career to pursue. This inability to perceive the long term has many stuck in the immediate. They spend hours every day surfing job sites and sending out hundreds of job applications, rather than building a career. Many others hover in limbo. As Nicholas Eberstadt shows in his book Men Without Work, some six million American men in their prime are either not working or not looking for work. A large percentage of these, says Eberstadt, devote their days to drugs and video games (perhaps using the manual and spatial abilities that could have been harnessed in vocational training to build buildings and infrastructure). With no long-term vision for a career, they are “waiting for the world to change,” as John Mayer put it.

　　Besides promoting stability, leaders can model and encourage long-term thinking in their rhetoric, no matter how large or small the scope of the project. For example, in his “Moon Shot” speeches, John F. Kennedy articulated the need to be the first nation to put a man on the moon, both to stay ahead of the Soviets in the Cold War and to fulfill what he saw as America’s role as a pioneering nation in the long history of mankind. Only a tiny percentage of Americans were directly involved in the space program. Yet Kennedy’s rhetoric in the Space Race inspired a generation of citizens to dream big, challenge limits, and think in decades.

　　Beyond religion and politics, the face-to-face voluntary associations that Tocqueville famously identified also promote long-term thinking. These include family, schools, and local civic associations—all the myriad “little platoons” we belong to, as Burke put it. Through the long process of showing up and engaging in the meetings, the classes, the games, the dinners, the services, and the ceremonies, people establish a continuity of collective thought and a shared hierarchy of values that creates trust, communication, and structure necessary to ponder long-term aims and how to achieve them. In so doing, citizens secure their place, status, and identity in society—all the things that the tumultuousness of democracy tends to destabilize. This self-created stability frees citizens up to contemplate the long term.

　　Since Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, the culture of immediacy in modern democracies has escalated by orders of magnitude. Thus now more than ever, we need to recognize the importance of creating the conditions that make it possible for citizens to contemplate the long-term. If Tocqueville is right, one way to do this is by emphasizing the value of religion and the perspective it encourages, which redirects citizens’ attention beyond the momentary vicissitudes of democratic life and toward the eternal. This means emphasizing the aspects of religion that call for service and sacrifice and enduring hardship in the pursuit of worthy long-term aims. And if Burke is right, another way to promote long-term thinking is to promote the stability of the economy and the social order, so that when citizens look to the future, they can have some confidence that what they are aiming at will still exist when the future arrives.

　　One way to do this is to spend less time online and more in embodied life. Through face-to-face associations, citizens stabilize their social identities and connections and map the future together.Another way is by improving career education, which is woefully inadequate in America. What could be more stable than a country of agile, resilient workers who can envision a realistic, successful career for themselves, thanks to a strong understanding of both the complex job market and the value of their own natural talents? Only when such counterbalances to the pull of immediacy are established does it become possible to fulfill the promise of democracy, for average citizens to be able to see further and chart the course of their own lives toward distant horizons.