The concept of Soft Tyranny is as old as Democracy in America--the two-volume guide to all things American that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after he toured this country back in the Jacksonian era. And whose insights remain fresh.
A perceptive and prophetic observer, M. de Tocqueville said American society was always veering between two ideals: liberty and equality. And we are still seeking the right balance between them.
There will always be those social engineers who prefer the security of equality rather than invite the rewards--and risk the dangers--of liberty. Tocqueville, being a student of classical political theory, had no doubt that in the end tyranny would win out on these shores, as it had in the Greek city-states.
Why? Because the people inevitably tire of the disorder, divisions, and general uncertainty of governing themselves--and yearn for a dictator who will relieve them of all that trouble.
Alexis de Tocqueville was in doubt only about what shape such a tyranny would take in this new world. For in this unique society surely tyranny, too, was bound to come in a new form.
After long deliberation, the answer came to him: He envisioned a ruling power that would be "absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: It is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.
"For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"
Tocqueville didn't use the term Welfare State, or what we today call the nanny state, but he described how it would work with uncanny prescience--and a wry detachment.
The soft tyranny he envisioned "covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people . . . . "
"I have always thought," he added, with his usual percipience, "that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people."
If you doubt the relevance of Alexis de Tocqueville's dusty old ideas to today's bright, shiny Twittering America, just look around. Note the web of rules and regulations, with more being proposed all the time, that govern us from dawn to dusk, and that hovers over us even as we sleep on mattresses with tags we are enjoined not to remove under penalty of law. Or try to fill out your own income tax form without being shown the way by a certified (public accountant) guide.
Note the nigh-constant effluent of waivers, exemptions and changes that characterizes Obamacare, this president's "signature achievement," but one that remains a work in progress (or regress) that is never complete or certain. Or just cast a glance, if you dare, at the smothering web of taxes and fees that cover almost every program this administration has initiated--and now tinkers with on an almost daily if not hourly basis.
Whether by intention, accident or just inertia, today's maze of rules and regulations, each with its own extensive bureaucracy to administer it, keeps growing--much like the Internal Revenue Code.
But never fear, all of this is For Our Own Good. Or so we're assured. And indeed there is no malice in such all-encompassing regulation, just presumption--the presumption that we the people are incapable of making our own decisions and must have them made for us by an all-beneficent government.
Welcome to the age of soft tyranny.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:
pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 10/04/2015