ave tended toward that form, and presumably the new Constitution should be structured around this approach.
Rogers M. Smith notes the two streams of political though as to the degree to which Americans can be thought of as alike, with the one being the liberal democratic society in which most people share in a free and equal society, and the alternative which recognizes "the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities through most of U.S. history" (Smith 549). Smith refers to the society that has developed as embodying multiple traditions. He challenges the thesis of Alexis de Tocqueville that America has been shaped primarily by free and egalitarian ideas and the beneficial material conditions that obtained at the birth of the nation. Still, Smith sets out to challenge de Tocqueville's thesis "by showing that its adherents fail to give due weight to inegalitarian ideologies and conditions that have shaped the participants and the substance of American politics just as deeply" (Smith 549).
Alexis de Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America set out to describe the way in which a particular social condition, that of equality, made itself manifest in the political institutions of the American nation and in the customs, habits, and manners of its citizens. The social condition of equality is the moving force and principle of democratic regimes, and for de Tocqueville this is the fundamental fact from which all others will have to be derived. While praising democracy in many res
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