Posted
on July 29, 2014
Born
in Paris on this date in 1805, Alexis de Tocqueville was a political
thinker, historian, and writer. He did the important work of
traveling around a country that was not his own, studying living
standards and social conditions, and then carefully analyzing and
writing about his findings. The country he studied was the relatively
new nation called the United States of America.
Tocqueville's
two-volume work on the U.S. is called Democracy in America;
the book was published in 1835 and 1840. This glimpse of pre-Civil
War America is invaluable to historians today, and many people
continue to read and quote Tocqueville.
They
also MISquote Tocqueville. Here is one misquote: “The American
Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can
bribe the public with the public's money.”
Hmm...Is
Congress spending “public money” (money raised from the public
through taxes) on public projects like parks, roads, bridges,
education, etc., etc. – could it ever properly be called a “bribe”?
A
bribe is getting someone to act in one's favor by illegally or
dishonestly giving him or her money or “some other inducement.”
I
guess a Congressional Representative somehow laying his hands on
public money and slipping it to individual citizens to make them vote
for him might qualify as a bribe – and is, I'm sure, against the
law. But nobody thinks that is going on. Nobody uses that quote to
mean that, and nobody reads that quote and thinks that.
No,
I think that the quote is used to make it seem as if Congressional
Representatives advocating projects in their own district is
inherently wrong. But projects to “provide common defense” and
“promote general welfare” are actually what government is for,
and what else would fund them other than public monies?
At
any rate, this misquote has been traced back to a similar sentiment
written by Elmer T. Peterson but attributed to Alexander Fraser
Tytler (without any citation of Peterson's source).
If
you want to read an actual quote from Tocqueville, here is one:
AMONG
the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the
United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general
equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the
prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole
course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion
and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the
governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed.
I
get from that quote that Tocqueville was surprised at how little
economic “class” seemed to matter in early American politics.
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