Is America Becoming Europe?

In the face of Europe’s all-too-obvious moral, political, and demographic decline, Americans should not gloat or be smug. Unless something changes in the near future, the odds are good that we will follow our European cousins on the path that leads to servitude. In the course of the last century, we, too, have contracted what I call the French disease — under Democrats and Republicans alike, the malady advances at a quickening pace.

Today marks 150 years since the death of Alexis de Tocqueville. Is the democracy that he wrote about with such sharp insight dead as well? The steady erosion of mores, manners, and religion suggests, at the very least, that its condition may be critical.

Many of the moral obstacles to majority tyranny identified in Democracy in America have now disappeared. In the United States, the legal profession and the courts were once, as Tocqueville observed, a restraint on the populist impulse. Today, their game is demagoguery, and their aim is to anticipate, strengthen, guide, and profit from the impulse that they once restrained. In the name of democracy, legal activists and politicized judges are willing to sweep away forms and formalities; in the name of progress, they are prepared to run roughshod over the legislative branch, especially in the states and localities; and, in the name of compassion, they are prepared to sanction systematic theft. Whether genuinely responsible for a tort or not, the defendant who has deep pockets is made to pay.