Primary Problems of Democracy

The primary problems of democracy addressed by the The Federalist Papers, and Alexis de Tocqueville have to do with balancing competing interests or goals. These problems include balancing the powers of the states and the federal government, the power of the majority and the rights of the minority or minorities, the power of small states and the power of large states, the slave states and the non-slave states, the power of elites and the rights of the non-elites, the rights of individuals and the need for a government powerful enough to maintain law and order, the need for representative government and the need to keep the people politically involved, and the need for an effective government and the need to prevent a repetition of the sort of tyranny against which the colonies revolted.

The views of the authors of The Federalist Papers and de Tocqueville stand in stark contrast to one another in their perceptions of these various balancing acts. The Federalist Papers reveal a distrust of "the people" and a pessimistic perspective of their ability to govern themselves. The essence of the Papers is their emphasis on the need for a strong central government which gives the people and the states as little power as possible.

De Tocqueville, on the other hand, seems to be a naive, romantic tourist from another planet, in awe of the glowing experiment of American democracy and its inherent faith in the ability of the people to effectively govern themselves. He almost invariably

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powers" to fight off such force and influence (Madison, No. 2). Both Madison and de Tocqueville assume that the "liberties" they discuss have already been fairly distributed among the populace. They ignore the fact that slaves, women, children, the poor, and all other non-white, non-male, non-property-owners are excluded from any of their serious and lofty discussions of liberty and government. De Tocqueville, for example, describes the local community as the building block of liberty, or the nation itself, as if that community were a sort of American Garden of Eden: The strength of free peoples resides in the local community. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people's reach; they teach people to enjoy its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it (de Tocqueville 63). The naive Frenchman wrote these words thirty years before the freeing of the slaves. Then as now, the most gross violations of the rights of human beings are perpetuated at the level of de Tocqueville's beloved "local community." In de Tocqueville's examination of "Life in the Township," he writes approvingly of the Madisonian argument that individuals agree to obey the government "because

Category: Government - P