Democracy with American Characteristics | 250th Episode at Tocqueville's Chateau
America Is No Longer a Democracy, That's Why I Immigrated
In 1776, people immigrated to America for EQUALITY, to live without lords or kings.
In 2016, I came to America for her INEQUALITY, to learn from billionaires and intellectuals who have achieved an unequaled greatness.
America has abandoned its founding principle of equality, but that’s not a completely bad thing.
Canada, where I came from, scoffs at American inequality, but the best Canadians immigrate for it. We come here precisely for this inequality and the unbounded limits of achievement it opens up. In Canada, all humans are given more respect regardless of their achievements. Society is materially and socially more equal. But when you are given a participation trophy for just being human, there isn’t the same lust for success.
The same sentiments of equality so hospitable to the majority are suffocating for the ambitious.
Ask yourself this American: why do the best talent from stable, rich, lawful western democracies all want to come to the US? What do you have that no one else does?
If they wanted equality they would go to Norway.
If they loved private property, New Zealand protects it more.
If they craved rule of law they could go to Canada.
If they were tired of European civilization and wanted to immerse themselves in non-western cultures, they would go to Paris.
What you have that none of the other democracies do is radical inequality, and that’s why we are here. The vast chasm between the billionaire and the struggling worker, the Ivy League chair and the wandering community college adjunct, the best private healthcare in the world and no healthcare at all sets Americans into a frenzy, a frenzy that most would be happier living without. Most Americans would live better lives in Canada.
But the same fire that makes chaff smoke makes gold glow.
And a tiny minority of you are able to capture that frenzy, that lightning in a bottle, and transmute it towards great ends. That energy is what we came to America for.
America is unrecognizable from that of 250 years ago. When Tocqueville visited, just a few decades after the founding, America was so equal that one of his chief worries was that this equality would result in a complacent mediocrity that left no verticality for greatness. Today that has flipped, America is the only country in the western hemisphere hospitable to greatness, but at the terrible cost of not just equality but its very nature as a democracy. America has increasingly taken on the features of aristocracy it once stood proudly against.
But just because America betrayed, what Tocqueville considered, its founding principle, that doesn’t mean you Americans can no longer embrace it:
Rome was first a kingdom, and there was beauty in Romulus’ founding, in Numa’s laws, in Lucretia’s suicide.
~250 years later, Rome became a republic, it defined itself against the Tarquins and kingship. But there was new republican beauty to be found: in Regulus’ honor, in Cicero’s oratory, in Cato’s stubbornness.
And then Rome changed again, into an empire. It betrayed everything the republic stood for. But there was a new imperial beauty to be found: in Vergil’s lines, in the wisdom of the five good Emperors, in the conversion of Constantine.
America has no less betrayed who she was, but that does not mean there is not a new aristocratic beauty to fall in love with in your great country.
This lecture, given at the very Chateau where Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, is my love letter to this new America; to a country that has accepted me with open arms, furnished me with unlimited freedom and resources; a country in which ten years ago I came not knowing a single soul, and now call home and have formed my deepest relationships; a country in which I’ve in turn come to love, not for who she was, not for who she would like to be, but for who she has become.
And my gift to America on her 250th birthday is to help you see and delight in your new republic through my fresh foreign eyes that never saw what was and does not long for it, but only sees what is and delights in it. As Tocqueville says, “the majority … lives in perpetual adoration of itself; only foreigners or experience can make certain truths reach the ears of the Americans.”
This is America’s next chapter, a mixed democratic-aristocratic constitution or, if it’s easier to swallow, “Democracy with American Characteristics.”