Alexis de Tocqueville:The Blue-Red Conundrum

Have you ever wondered why conservatives and liberals are so different. In the early history of the US, two cultures developed and Alexis de Tocqueville described them. These two American cultures collided during the Civil War and they are still colliding.

Alexis de Tocqueville In Democracy in America, published in 1835, wrote of the New World and its growing democratic order. Observing from the perspective of a detached social scientist, Tocqueville wrote of his travels through America in the early 19th Century.

He observed the market revolution, Western expansion, and Jacksonian democracy were transforming the fabric of American life. He saw democracy balancing liberty and equality, concern for the individual as well as the community.

By the late 18th Century, democratic values in the North, which championed money-making, hard work, and individualism had eradicated most of the remaining vestiges of old world aristocracy and values.

Eliminating them in the South proved more difficult, for slavery had produced a landed aristocracy and web of patronage and dependence similar to the old world, which would last until the antebellum period before the Civil War.

Tocqueville contrasted the settlers of Virginia with the middle-class, religious Puritans who founded New England, and analyzed the debasing influence of slavery:

The men sent to Virginia were seekers of gold, adventurers without resources and without character, whose turbulent and restless spirit endangered the infant colony...

Artisans and agriculturalists arrived afterwards...hardly in any respect above the level of the inferior classes in England. No lofty views, no spiritual conception presided over the foundation of these new settlements. 

The colony was scarcely established when slavery was introduced; this was the capital fact which was to exercise an immense influence on the character, the laws and the whole future of the South. 

Slavery...dishonors labor; it introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man. 

De Tocqueville noted, "On this same English foundation there developed in the North very different characteristics."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville

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