Tocqueville on the Bush Years

It takes time to assess a presidency.

Harry S Truman left office reviled, only to enjoy huge popularity after colorful biographies were published, decades later.

Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, but enjoyed partial success burnishing his credentials as a foreign policy sage.

Bill Clinton left office after surviving impeachment, but has earned high marks for his charity work since then, despite some bumps in the 2008 campaign.

Can President George W. Bush expect the same sort of surge? In theory it is possible, though the odds are long. Already, as he rides off into the sunset, it is clear that the sun is setting much faster than usual. A recent survey of historians revealed that a shocking 61 percent consider him the worst president in American history.

The first retrospective of the Bush presidency will take place approximately eight hours after he leaves office, when Will Ferrell will debut his satirical salute to Bush, "You're Welcome, America," on Broadway.

The recession - which all politicians, right and left, will be happy to leave at the doorstep of the ex-president - will not end soon. Problems will long persist in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and they too will be attributable to a certain former president.

If President Barack Obama hangs this hair shirt around his predecessor, he will only be following in the footsteps of - yes - his predecessor. President No. 43 was never shy about pointing the finger of blame at 42.

But still, there is hope for the Bush team. He will write books, build an imposing $300 million library in Dallas and convene seminars on the important themes of his presidency.

There, deep in his Texan bunker, a most unlikely ally may come to his aid, in the person of a diminutive French writer with an aristocratic pedigree.

Despite the much-ballyhooed tension between the Bush team and France during the "freedom fries" era, Bush has never stopped citing his muse, Alexis de Tocqueville. Indeed, he once called him his favorite political thinker, prompting some surprise that he had a favorite.

In a speech at Calvin College in May 2005, Bush argued that Tocqueville was no mere historical figure, but an oracle who had written "an agenda for our time." As retirement looms, he is still communing with his oracle, anticipating that his library will explore the themes cultivated by Tocqueville in his classic work, "Democracy in America."

At first glance, that makes sense. Bush talked a great deal about democracy during his eight years. But there are pitfalls with an all-Tocqueville, all-the-time approach. The chief danger is that people will actually read him.

If it is true that Tocqueville wrote many kind things about the United States, he also offered honest criticism - the part of his work that we remember less vividly. He feared that our relentless conformity, or "tyranny of the majority," would drown out dissent. He worried about the "exceedingly wearisome" pursuit of wealth and the rise of a moneyed class that would someday weaken democracy, and perhaps even cause depressions.

He thought our political speeches were atrocious exercises in bombast. He disapproved of the lack of interest Americans displayed in other cultures, and their "irritable patriotism" that insisted on praise all of the time and bitterly resented criticism.

Giving himself a plug, he wrote, "the majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause, and there are certain truths which the Americans can learn only from strangers." He barely concealed his disdain for evangelical religion when he wrote, "religious insanity is very common in the United States." All right, he did not conceal it at all.

But even when Tocqueville was praising the United States, which he did often, he lauded elements of our society that do not prompt Bush donors to whip out their checkbooks.

Equality, for instance, which Tocqueville saw as the engine that drove everything. Or the natural inclination of democracies to peace, and the fact that the United States had no standing army. Or our tendency to reject hereditary wealth. Or our thriving culture of independent newspapers ("the only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists").

Perhaps the weirdest fact, from the perspective of the future director of the Bush library, is that Tocqueville came here as a prison inspector who wanted to see America's enlightened system of incarceration.

Bush has identified the Tocquevillean concept he admires most - the natural tendency of Americans to form associations, or as the president put it, "to associate in a voluntary way to kind of transcend individualism." But even that can backfire, for it would be difficult to think of a more striking recent example than the enormous phalanx of citizens and small donors who joined social networks and online groups to advance the candidacy of Bush's successor, Barack Obama.

Not all of Tocqueville's news is bad for the outgoing president. He admired many American virtues that might align themselves well with the George W. Bush Presidential Center, including our dislike for philosophy, our preference for the pragmatic over the theoretical and our "taste for physical well-being."

Perhaps there will someday be a Alexis D. Tocqueville Self-Enhancement and Athletic Facility inside the sprawling complex that will grow on the campus of Southern Methodist University.

One American virtue in particular fascinated Tocqueville: "I have often noticed in the United States that it is not easy to make a man understand that his presence may be dispensed with; hints will not always suffice to shake him off."

That stubborn tenacity is certainly a quality of the 43rd president, as both admirers and detractors will agree, and it is exactly that characteristic which has allowed many previous scapegoats to clamber back to a level of acceptability.

Tocqueville concluded his work with a warning against the forms of despotism that might imperil democracy in the future. He saw some of his warnings come true - not in the United States, but in France, when a self-proclaimed champion of liberty, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, assumed despotic power in a coup. Earlier in his book, he had peered through the centuries to get at the end of democracy:

"Because the civilization of ancient Rome perished in consequence of the invasion of the Barbarians, we are perhaps too apt to think that civilization cannot perish in any other manner. If the light by which we are guided is ever extinguished, it will dwindle by degrees and expire of itself. By dint of close application to mere applications, principles would be lost sight of; and when the principles were wholly forgotten, the methods derived from them would be ill pursued."

It is unlikely that we will see those words engraved in the pediment of the structure soon to rise in Dallas. But like so much of Tocqueville, it's worth a thought at this resurgent moment for democracy in America.