dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

We need a republican remedy, not a bureaucratic one, to the disease of executive-branch abuses of power.

In the aftermath of Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s report on FBI misconduct during highly sensitive investigations of Hillary Clinton’s emails, we might turn to an unlikely source for wisdom: Alexis de Tocqueville.

In the midst of any contemporary agitation, it’s always useful to turn to Tocqueville. And he can offer plenty of resources for us to think about our contemporary scandal-ridden Washington, its breaches of the rule of law, and its accompanying investigations. Rumors of wrongdoing and federal inquests are nothing new. They usually find presidents at one point or another during their tenure in office: Watergate, Iran-Contra, Whitewater, Lewinsky, Valerie Plame, and now the accusations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The Obama administration largely escaped, though it may not have been for lack of evidence on certain matters. But to classify properly the power of scandal and investigation in our time requires thinking about how a modern democracy will hold itself accountable to the sovereignty of the people. We should labor for a republican remedy to the disease of executive-branch abuses of power. The bureaucratic remedy we have instead sought has only made us sicker.

Special Prosecutor Tocqueville

Near the end of Democracy in America, Tocqueville addressed the issue in a chapter entitled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” Passages in this chapter are prescient in their description of what we now call the administrative state. Tocqueville fears that a tutelary “protective power,” one that “is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentile,” will come to rule democracies. This power, strangely, is exercised under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people, to guide and keep them free. Such consolidated rule will concede to the people a popular vote at regular intervals knowing that it, ultimately, holds the only authentic authority.

Bent to its will, we regard its operations as beneficial to us democrats. Tocqueville notes that Roman emperors held an “immense and unchecked power.” This authority was abused “to deprive a man arbitrarily of life or property,” but, Tocqueville observes, those victimized were only a few; most were left alone. Modern democracy’s despotism, he says, will be different because the political fact of equality will make us into persons very different from those who lived in the age of aristocracy.

Such despotism emerges because persons who are “alike and equal” will tend to drift into their own worlds, Tocqueville observes. We trust our own opinions, believing them equal to everyone else’s — except for when we don’t. Equality tends to strip from us firm religious, traditional, or even community support for our opinions, inducing us to fall prey to the power of anonymous public opinion generated by various experts.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/alexis-de-tocqueville-on-presidential-scandals/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexis-de-Tocqueville