democracy in america Archives - Fabius Maximus website

A warning from Alexis De Tocqueville about our military

By Larry Kummer, Editor / 12 Comments / 7 August 2009 7 November 2010

This analysis was brought to our attention in this comment by Grimgrin: an excerpt from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. It’s eerie how accurately he foresaw the evolution of America. We can still profit from his insights, almost 140 years after they were written. We have, with little forethought, done something the Founders strongly warned against: created a …

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A soft despotism for America?

By Larry Kummer, Editor / 10 Comments / 22 July 2008 10 November 2012

This is the last in a series about the death of our political regime — caused by changes in the American character. This is an almost inevitable evolution, seen clearly by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1840, described in Democracy in America. Here he describes a likely fate of our Constitutional experiment, a soft despotism by an increasingly …

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de Tocqueville warns us not to become weak and servile

By Larry Kummer, Editor / 2 Comments / 21 July 2008 10 November 2012

In “Americans, the subservient” I speculated that our regime — with the Constitution as its foundation — may be dying because of changes in the character of the American people. In his letter to Harper’s Magazine (August 2008, subscribers only) Fred Nollan, elaborated on Mark Slouka’s June 2008 article, “Democracy and Deference,” describing how “Americans have become comfortable with the undemocratic qualities …

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A happy ending to the current economic recession

By Larry Kummer, Editor / 17 Comments / 12 February 2008 12 September 2009

History shows the difficulty of predicting the short-term path of economic or political events. However, we can often see the medium-term with greater clarity. In January 1942 none could forecast the events of the next 44 months, but it did not take an expert to see that the US would defeat Japan. So it is with the …

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Diagnosing the Eagle: book recommendations

By Larry Kummer, Editor / 2 Comments / 31 December 2007 7 January 2018

The following note by Chet Richards was extracted from the comments on An important thing to remember as we start a New Year (Chet is Editor of Defense and the National Interest and writes at his blog): Could you comment on what it is that gives the United States its enormous competitive strength? Let me throw out an …

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