Long considered a masterpiece account of early American history and one of the founding works of comparative politics, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is one of those few books that truly lives up to it’s hype. Divided into two parts, de Tocqueville uses his experiences travelling and speaking to numerous persons of high and low standing across the newly born United States to investigate the soil in which the North American soul grows.

After providing some geological, political and geopolitical commentary in the beginning of the work – the reader immediately begins on a panoramic journey across the regions of New England. The focus is primarily on political institutions, their procedures, areas of authority, electoral norms and the various players within government be they parties or individuals seeking to ensure their interests are brought to bear. In his frequently comparisons of these aspects of political life to their French counterparts – America reliably is described as the preferable system.

In his descriptions of the American system of northeastern townships, the powers granted to local governments, the general ideas concerning administration and the salutary social and economic benefits of decentralization – de Tocqueville gives an paean to American political innovation with only occasional interspersions of criticism. The New World’s lack of an historical, hereditary Aristocracy provided space for meritocracy to grow. The best representatives of this class? Hard-working Protestant settlers willing to brave the frontiers to establish plantations and the merchants who’d live exceptionally frugally just so that they’d be able to undercut the British by a mere 1% on costs. While not blind to the reality or roles of blacks and indigenous peoples in this new world, he sees little room for their inclusion into the body politic. The latter group defies any attempt at being included within the body politic – understandably so considering the patter of dispossession and war. The former lacks the educational capactities to meaningfully participate. This is not to say that he’s an uncritical supporter of settler colonialism. He states that whites must one day drastically adjust the way they treat slaves, something which will be hard to do as the influence of slavery has penetrated into “the master’s soul and gave a particular turn to his ideas and tastes” (184). And yet he also recognizes that the literacy of Anglo-Saxon culture, along with it’s technological development and drive towards progress as a foundational societal goal are the traits of successful, long-lasting civilizations – meaning that these groups must catch up, not the other way around.

de Tocqueville’s conception of Government is aligned with Aristotlean concepts. The composition of interests by those in it’s institutions are always changing due  to external events and this leads Democracies to change into oligarchy, aristocracy, tyranny and extreme democracy – or mob rule. While nationalist figures may want to make the founding covenant of Government sacred, in other words, there are always conflicts which lead to it’s descralization via various forms of corruption.

de Tocqueville frequently invokes the difference between Liberty and Democracy – associated with the new United States – with Absolute Monarchy or Despotism, or pre-Revolutionary France. His thoughts on these matter may lack some of the academic rigor that historians or sociologists of the present would require, there is a dearth of anything approaching something that could be called quantitative analysis – however they are nevertheless insightful as, intuitively, one can see their honesty. Take this, for example:

“Despotism brings men to ruin more by preventing them from producing than by taking away the fruits of their labors, it dries up the fount of wealth while often respecting acquired riches. By liberty engenders a thousandfold more goods than it destroy, and in nations where it is understood, the people’s resources always increase faster than the taxes.” (107).

This tension between liberty understood as Rights to be exercised and tyrrany understood as non-elective obligations to Power pervades de Tocqueiville’s work and is likely what has made him so enjoyed by Americanists.

Elective associations – be it political, economic or religious – that are entered into freely are considered the basis of identity and the means of self-reproduction.

Using taxes as a form of gratifying private needs – such as in the modern context, Medicare for All – is a form of graft that depletes the Virtues required for a democratic system. Democracy requires literacy, education and most of all virtue – for it is by presuming that the people don’t have the capacity to properly manifest their own interests that tyranny by a calculating political class comes to be.

What de Tocqueville means here is the different between equality in opportunity versus equality of outcome.

When resentment is mass-mobilized against prosperity, political stability is lost as the public order turns to an amoral model. If I had more inclination I’d give a number of modern examples as I think his insights into self-interest, virtue and democracy are quite compelling. But instead I’ll say that the active qualities of an individual are lionized as without them they become unable to see how the achieve the welath, power, renown and other rewards of work that they crave.

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Here is a guide for those that wish to read along with the insights of experts.

“What else is communism but the imperialism of the Jews?”
– Camil Petrescu, Romanian playwright, novelist, philosopher and poet

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A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevismby Paul Hanebrink is considered by Samuel Moyn to be “a new classic in the canon of twentieth century history.” The book examines this particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitic thought that believed Soviet Communism to be a Jewish plot. This notion continues today in a number of ethno-nationalist strains, such as the writings of David Duke, thus as a work of engaged academics – this is a welcome historical work. 

In his reconstruction of the transnational European locations in which the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism first developed and describing it’s mutations – Hanebrink provides a truly compelling account of history. Following the Russian revolution of 1917 German, Polish, German, Hungarian, Romanian and British fears of Judeo-Bolshevism were pervasive.

The Bolsheviks themselves were not immune turning their Jewish comrades cultural and religious background against them. In Russia, Czech Republic and elsewhere the Communist Party culled their own or used rumors of Jewishness to destroy careers and reputations. Hanebrink describes several cases wherein Judaism becomes seen as a marker for Cosmopolitanism, which was a code for one that was likely to express disloyalty to the State in thoughts or deeds. The concept used to describe such events are “sovereignty panics” and frequently applied to anyone close to the functions of the government.

Some of the common responses to such conditions were appeals for religious or cultural renewal, the rewriting of laws, as well as the dispossession, expulsion or murder of Jews and a heightened willingness to ally with states – i.e. Germany – that expressed willingness to help combat the Jewish/Communist menace. Hanebrink’s brilliance in this work is by extensive archival research which shows that much of the handwringing over Jews, based as it was an exaggeration of the Jewishness of Communist Party activists, often related to more material interests such as desire for assurances of more territory (Poland) and the illiterate provincial’s resentment of an older, literary culture that considered themselves better equipped to govern a modern state (Hungary). Because of this elasticity and the empirically dubious methodology of identifying Judeo-Bolshevik plots – it functioned as a sort of intellectual contagion…

Immigration, Existential Fears and the Racial Other

Judeo-Bolshevism made Adolph Hitler famous in Germany, while the Nazi party’s weaponization of the idea their success helping to propagate it such that it could fit a variety of contexts helped him internationally. Their literature and the institutions that they sought to spread awareness of this identity and with it a Nationalist hysteria. Old fashioned geopolitics with this identity politics twist became especially dangerous and toxic as the European continent prepared for war.

Once war officially began, nationalist militaries and militias began to turn their hysterical fears into actions they deemed as defensive. Worries over international spy networks, espionage, racial and cultural purity, and fears of wartime food shortages turned this socio-cultural tension into the Holocaust that is well known about, as well as numerous other pogroms and forced exiles. As this was oftentimes done in the peripheral towns, the imperial capitals came to host those forced into exile. “75,000 Jews fled war-torn Galicia for Vienna… Another 25,000 sought shelter in Budapest” and almost all of them – having been forced from their land, homes and occupations with only what they could carry were marked by the bitterest poverty, trauma and desolation (55). The situation created by these reproduced what it was that criticism of this minority feared – a desperate mass of a racially “othered” people that was agitating for significant change.

Personal Reflection on the Book

Over a decade ago my father and I travelled to the village in what is now Ukraine where much of my paternal family were killed in anti-Jewish pogroms before and during World War II. The Synagogue in this small village has stayed in a ruinous state since it was firebombed. The burial grounds adjacent to it has become a path for cows to reach an adjacent pasture. The headstones that populated this once sacred space have all been broken into pieces, and the etchings of names and dates on them are filled with black moss and have largely been eroded away by weathering. As Hanebrink recounts the events which lead to the murderous melees in and around Lvov, it was hard for me not to be profoundly affected by this narrative. It made me understand all the better my now-deceased Grandmother’s combination of deeply felt progressivism views and strong aversion to communism.

It’s because of this that I found the section describing the development of “Judeo-Christian” civilization to be so personally illuminating. and the manner in which many post-WWII intellectual sought to connect Soviet Communism with Germany Nazism. While I’ve read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianismand Domenico Losurdo’s Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism – I admit to not being very informed on many of the debates surrounding the use of the concept.

Criticisms of the Book

There are several points wherein Hanebrink makes numerical claims that beg further explanation but that aren’t developed. I understand that this may have to do with the fact that principles of data science haven’t made their way into the discipline of history writing, but if they were it would have made this book significantly better. I say this as despite making several claims that the number of Jewish people within the Communist Party by those on the Nationalist Right was vastly inflated, there’s only a few instances where he cites actual numbers. I do not believe that he is misrepresenting reality here, sources are always referenced to back up his claims, but I do feel like the inclusion of some infographics and chart that visualize the data to which he is referring would be a far superior means of making his case. If in one image, for instance, he was to organize geographic claims made on the Jewish components of the party alongside their actual numbers based on the now-publicly-available data on party membership i.e. “In Romania it was claimed that Jews were “almost all” of the party while their records indicate that they were only “20-40%” that’s a more effective means of making the point. In another point, related to this criticism, he talks about the reality effect and viral spread of Jews conceptualized as “parochial anxieties about the nation and it’s enemies (32). A timeline chart showing publication dates of the sources he’d uncovered which supported this rational claim would have effectively supported this position.

Another criticism that I had of the book, which is unfortunately typical of a lot of academic writings, is the variated repetition of important ideas. I didn’t count the number of times I read a variation of “The concept of Judeo-Bolshevism was a concept used by Religious and Nationalist communities by which to understand their current political crisis,” but if I had to guess it’d be somewhere around 50. This is admittedly a petty criticism, but I found myself getting annoyed when every few pages I read a different iteration of an already established summation.

Lastly, I was hoping that the author would draw some minor connections from the history around Judeo-Bolshevism to that around Cultural Marxism – the narrative centered around Jewish Marxists from the Frankfurt School setting up shop at New York’s New School for Social Research. But then again that would really require another book to cover…

That said, these negative assessments are minor and the book is truly a great work of history. My hardback copy is highly annotated, and the prose was crisp and insightful. I imagine I’ll come back to it again in a few years.

Also, if you’re interested, read some more in-depth reviews on the book here.