De Tocqueville's "Democracy In America"
...government would grow
politically and socially under the umbrella of democracy. He sees the United
States as a unique entity because of how and why it started as well as its
geographical location.
De Tocqueville explains that the foundations of the
democratic process in America are completely different from anywhere else on
the globe. The land was virginal and the colonies had almost complete sovereignty
from England from the very beginning because they were separated by an ocean
and financial troubles. The people who came to America were the oppressed
and unhappy in England and all were trying to find a place where they could
start anew and create a political structure that would facilitate an individual
freedom unlike anything that they had previously experienced in Europe. De
Tocqueville believed that the nature of democracy in the New World rested within
the fact that all of the emigrants were basically from the same social strata,
resulting in the first new country where there was no preliminary basis for
an aristocracy. "Land is the basis of an aristocracy
and
[in America] when
the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient to enrich
a proprietor and a farmer at the same t
ime(41)." He saw that even the soil
of America was opposed to the structure of an aristocracy.
There
were also outside influences lending unvoiced support for the creation of this
new democracy. Being an ocean apart from its mother country, who at this time
did not have the financial reserves to oversee its colonies, let the Americans
govern themselves. If they had not had this sovereignty at the beginning America
might have become something completely different than it is today, but that
was not the case, so these emigrants now had a fertile place to plant their
ideas of a country founded upon the many ideas of the...
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