“Making America Gothic Again: Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America Today”

Abstract

Few historical phenomena seem less gothic than democracy, an ideal that is virtually always figured in terms of rational enlightenment and transparency, all of which made the January 6th insurrection in Washington especially unsettling: an interruption, not just of the important business of the day but of the most fundamental progressivist narratives of western civilization. But there have been other, more ominous accounts of democracy that would have figured these events more as a culmination than an interruption of the larger historical forces at work. Writing in the aftermath of the insurrection, this paper returns to Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning in Democracy in America that however precious, democracy was not the antithesis of despotism but an historically specific set of conditions that lent themselves to new, more insidious forms of despotism which would “degrade men without tormenting them.” Confronted with the spectre of this unprecedented form of oppression, Tocqueville warned in classic gothic terms that its greatest threat may have been its obscurity: “the old words of despotism and of tyranny do not work. The thing is new, so I must try to define it since I cannot name it.” It was, by all measures, a classic gothic tale: democracy as the basis for rather than safeguard against unprecedented and even unnameable forms of tyranny. This paper asks how Tocqueville’s warning can better understand our own highly polarized political situation today.