One of the most famous elements from Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is his discussion of “soft despotism.” Tocqueville’s description of soft despotism is familiar—“despotism of this kind does not ride roughshod over humanity,” “it does not tyrannize”—and the immediate result is that the nation is reduced “to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” Tocqueville speaks of “an immense tutelary power” looming over the citizenry, like a great “schoolmaster,” seeking to keep citizens “fixed irrevocably in childhood.”

　　It’s a haunting description. But Tocqueville saw that the drama involved yet another act. If soft despotism is the Bad, what comes next is the Very Bad.

　　After Soft Despotism

　　Recent pieces at Law Liberty—one by Samuel Gregg and one by Russell Greene commenting on Gregg—make apt use of Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning against soft despotism, but neither references this still worse state of affairs. Greene, in his essay, shows real interest in the question of what follows on soft despotism, but he doesn’t look to Tocqueville for guidance on this point. He writes that “some pathologies of 2025 America, though,might have surprised even Tocqueville,” noting that Tocqueville foresaw “citizens under ‘soft despotism’ as industrious” and that much of modern society is anything but. Greene notes that Tocqueville’s soft despotism is “regular, provident, and mild,” it “provides for [citizens’] security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry.” Greene justly responds: “This is not the problem we have in America today.” After describing today’s actual moral implosion and governmental chaos, Greene writes, “This is not soft despotism; it is more likehard incompetence.”

　　In fact, Tocqueville does understand and warn that there can be an even greater object of dread and terror than regular, lawful, provident, suffocating despotism. This emerges after the population has become morally degenerate. Tocqueville even writes that “my fears … have changed their object.” I have discussed this before in an essay on “Pondering Tocqueville’s Dystopias,” because it is important for readers today to see that beyond the Bad lies the Very Bad.

　　Tocqueville’s Very Bad

　　Tocqueville’s ominous warnings against soft despotism come to a point in the final part of Volume Two, culminating in “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” There he intimates a progression of authorial sentiments. He explains: “I had always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom,” including that the sovereign is “closely overseen by a really elected and independent legislature.” 

　　External forms of that kind are nice—if you can keep them. We should not comfort ourselves with the assumption that even those are entirely secure. Tocqueville turns to “the worst” possible object, when the concentrated lawmaking and administrative powers are deposited “in the hands of an irresponsible man or body.” Tocqueville then paints the Very Bad: Citizens “renounce the use of their wills”; they lose “little by little the faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting by themselves.”

　　Tocquevilles words hit home today, when political forces so often seem so unconnected to enduring understandings of the good and what advances it.

　　The Very Bad is the breakdown of the rule of law and the undoing of the equality of subjection. Whereas the Bad maintains a suffocating tutelary governmental power that subjects individuals universally and equally, according to officially posted rules, the Very Bad is a corrupt, rogue regime in which equality of subjection has disappeared. A despotic faction exercises government power unequally, without respect for law or procedure.

　　Tocqueville explains how the “ephemeral monster” of soft despotism is superseded:

　　A constitution that was republican at the head and ultramonarchical in all other parts [that is, government administration being centralized] has always seemed to me to be an ephemeral monster. The vices of those who govern and imbecility of the governed would not be slow to bring it to ruin; and the people, tired of their representatives and of themselves, would create freer institutions or soon return to lying at the feet of a single master.

　　Notice the phrase “has always seemed to me.” Tocqueville thus acknowledges that the authorial device he has used—telling of a progression of authorial sentiment since publishing Volume One—is just that, a rhetorical and pedagogical device. Tocqueville saw the Very Bad when writing Volume One.

　　The Despotism of Factions

　　“In democratic societies,” Tocqueville writes, “minorities can sometimes make [revolutions]. … Democratic peoples … are only carried along toward revolutions without their knowing it; they sometimes undergo them but they do not make them.” He goes on to describe the process by which a small minority may come to seize power and destroy both equality and law. 

　　Speaking of “the despotism of factions,” Tocqueville writes of “a few men” who “alone speak in the name of an absent and inattentive crowd: … they change laws and tyrannize at will over mores; and one is astonished at seeing the small number of weak and unworthy hands into which a great people can fall.” 

　　Ambitious people seeking to usurp constitutional government “have great trouble” doing so “if extraordinary events do not come to their aid.” But extraordinary events may lead the public to fall into line: “Nothing is more familiar to man than to recognize superior wisdom in whoever oppresses him.”

　　This kind of coup is able to succeed in part because civil society has already been weakened by soft despotism. Tocqueville writes about the loss of concern, religious or otherwise, for the future state: “When [persons] are once accustomed to no longer being occupied with what will happen after their lives, one sees them fall back easily into a complete brutish indifference to the future[, an indifference] that conforms only too well to certain instincts of the human species. … The present grows large; it hides the future that is being effaced, and men want to think only of the next day.” 

　　Each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions of matters that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself the greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at all.

　　Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.

　　Not only does it then happen that they allow their freedom to be taken away, but often they give it over.

　　The sovereign “therefore has a singular power among democratic peoples, the very idea of which aristocratic nations could not conceive. It does not persuade [one] of its beliefs, it imposes them and makes them penetrate souls by a sort of immense pressure of the minds of all on the intellect of each.”

　　The Very Bad was already foreshadowed in Volume One. Tocqueville, for example, warned of a centralized power that “destroys [institutions and customs] or modifies them at its will.” The crushed citizen “enjoys these goods as a tenant, without a spirit of ownership.” Any “miserable person” can understand “robbing the public treasury or selling favors of the state for money … and can flatter himself with doing as much in his turn.”

　　As “the influence exerted by the executive power” grows, Tocqueville, said, so grows “the dangers of the elective system.” He suggested that looming centralized power would corrupt elections, writing, “to wish … that the representative of the state remain armed with a vast power and be elected is to express, according to me, two contradictory wills.” Through the corruption of elections, the rapacious faction could shield itself from a threat arising from the electorate. Indeed, Tocqueville suggests that “those who want to make a revolution [might] take possession of the machinery of government, all set up, which can be executed by a coup.”

　　Tocqueville speaks of the sovereign in America as the people’s “master”: “In sacrificing their opinions to him, they prostitute themselves.” The master himself “sees himself as a foreigner in his country, and he treats his subjects as having been defeated.” If “the omnipotence of the majority” creates soft despotism, what may follow is “anarchy.” 

　　Tocqueville warns forebodingly of the Very Bad:

　　For the time approaches, when power is going to pass from hand to hand, when political theories will succeed one another, when men, laws, and constitutions themselves will disappear or be modified daily—and this lasting not only for a time, but constantly.

　　The words hit home today, when political forces so often seem so unconnected to enduring understandings of the good and what advances it. In the past, political leaders more often invoked substantive ideas to explain how their policy agenda advanced good ends. Today, when politicians use words like “freedom” or “democracy” it is unconvincing, and instead, we hear a passing stream of short-lived slogans and watchwords.

　　“A Sort of Religious Terror”

　　In the Introduction of Democracy in America, Tocqueville intimated: “The entire book that you are going to read,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution.”

　　Tocqueville accepts democracy. He fears what the modern democratic nation-state may produce—indeed, was producing, especially in France. He is trying to make democracy work and to preserve the equality of subjection—or rule of law. Samuel Gregg and Russell Greene are both correct that moral underpinnings are essential to those goals. Tocqueville suggested that the spirit of liberty (l’esprit de liberté) and the spirit of religion stand together—and fall together. When they fall together, the result is something even worse than soft despotism.