Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Tocqueville’s America and Ours:

On April 23, 1794, Chretien Guillaume De Lamoignon De Malesherbes, better known as Lamoignon-Malesherbes, seventy-three years old, counsel to Louis XVI in the trial that condemned the king to death, watched helplessly while his daughter, his son-in-law, and all their children were, one by one, guillotined in front of a howling mob of Parisians. Only then was he allowed to meet his own death by the same method. Not all of his grandchildren were murdered; one of them survived to become the mother of Alexis Henri Charles Maurice Clerel, Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy In America, the most important book on American democracy ever written. The French Revolution made the equal rights of every one a new religion and made democracy the only legitimate form of government. Everyone was equal, no one was more important than anyone else; everything had to be decided by the majority, whatever the effect on the rights of the minority. The problem was how to prevent a majority, made up almost always of the ignorant and the poor, from following someone who appealed to their sense of grievance and resentment, their demand that those above them should be brought down to their own level? How, in other words, protect against the “democratic despotism” Tocqueville considered the greatest threat to liberty the world had ever seen? He thought he might find the answer in America.

The America Tocqueville discovered in the 1830s bears a striking, and sometimes almost eerie, resemblance to the America of the present day. Change the name of the president we have now and Tocqueville becomes a contemporary writer:

“General Jackson is supposed to wish to establish a dictatorship in the United States.” And he has almost done it. President Jackson “keeps his position and his popularity by daily flattery of those passions,” i.e. the passions for equality. He is “the majority’s slave;” he yields to its “intentions, desires, and half-revealed instincts or rather he anticipates and forestalls them.” Worse yet, “he tramples his personal enemies underfoot wherever he finds them, with an ease impossible to any previous President; on his own responsibility he adopts measures which no one else would have dared attempt; sometimes he even treats the national representatives with a sort of disdain that is almost insulting; he refuses to sanction laws of Congress and often fails to answer that important body.”

What saved America, even at this early point in its existence, was its past. Two things had happened which made the American experiment in democracy possible. The first was the character of the people who first arrived in New England. “All the immigrants…belonged to the well-to-do classes at home,” and were well-educated. They had not come to the New World “to better their position or accumulate wealth; in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile they hoped for the triumph of an idea.” They created a democracy made up of citizens who, because of the “provision for public education,” were able to read the Bible, with the interesting, and perhaps unprecedented result that, in America it is “religion that leads to enlightenment and the observance of divine laws which leads men to liberty.”

The second thing that protected America from the “natural vice” of democracy, laws which make the actions of the people “ever prompter and more irresistible,” was the adoption of the American Constitution and the period of Federalist rule that lasted until the election of Andrew Jackson. This, Tocqueville insists, was “one of the luckiest circumstances attending the birth of the great American Union.” The Framers of the American Constitution, wanted to “restrain liberty against its self-destruction,” which meant limiting, so far as possible, the direct election of members of the government. Those “who consider universal suffrage as a guarantee of the excellence of the resulting choice suffer under a complete delusion.” Members of the House of Representatives, elected directly by the people, are at best mediocre, unable to string together two coherent sentences. Members of the Senate, who were then selected by the state legislatures, are, on the other hand, “eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and noted statesmen.”

The method by which the President is chosen shows how difficult it is to keep in place those restraints necessary to prevent democratic despotism. The electoral college was supposed to act as an ad hoc parliament, a parliament elected for only one purpose: to deliberate among themselves about who was best qualified by temperament and training to serve as the nation’s chief executive. For Tocqueville, and for most of the nation’s Founders, ambition for the office, ambition for any office, was thought a disqualification. Those who sought power should never be given it. It was a grand idea, a way to find someone as high-minded, as highly principled, as ‘great souled’ to use Aristotle’s expression, as George Washington; it was too far beyond the reach of the generation that came after Washington to make it work. Instead of a school of statesmen, the electoral college became, in Tocqueville’s view, a gathering of “dummies” who simply cast their ballots for candidates they had promised in advance to support.

The best protection against the “omnipotence of the majority,” was the law itself, the lawyers who practiced it and the judges who based their decisions upon it. Lawyers, from their study, acquire habits of order and an “instinctive love for a regular concatenation of ideas,” which leads them “naturally” to oppose the “ill-considered passions of democracy.” Conservative by habit, their respect for precedent, the settled opinions of the past, makes them value laws, not because they are good, but because they are old. This is why American lawyers are the “American aristocracy.” This aristocracy is headed by the Supreme Court, the most powerful judicial authority ever constituted. Justices, nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate for life, should be extremely well-qualified, men of “education and integrity,” statesmen able to confront any obstacles to the laws. If they were not, if the Court was composed by “rash or corrupt men,” the country “would be threatened by anarchy or civil war.”

The greatest danger to democracy, however, is not the structure of government; it is democracy itself, the effect it has on the manners and morals of a people. What do people look up to, what do they honor, what do they think important; what thought or idea comes to dominate, and define, their lives? In every age there is “some peculiar and predominating element which controls all the rest.” Equality is the “distinctive characteristic” of the Democratic age. People want equality with freedom, but if they can’t have it, they will take equality in slavery; they “will not endure aristocracy.” The danger is real. “If citizens, attaining equality, were to remain ignorant and coarse, it would be difficult to foresee any limit to the stupid excesses into which their selfishness might lead them, and no one could foretell into what shameful troubles they might plunge themselves….”

While equality is the distinctive characteristic of democracy, a “passion for well-being” is “the most striking and unalterable characteristic of democratic ages.” Men have “a taste for easy success and immediate pleasures.” They have “lively yet indolent ambitions; “they are moved by a “breathless cupidity” that “perpetually distracts the mind … from the pleasures of the imagination and the labors of the intellect and urges it on to nothing but the pursuit of wealth.” The darting speed of a quick, superficial mind is at a premium, while slow, deep thought is excessively undervalued.” The only thing Americans are really interested in is themselves, not what they have done in the past, but what they hope to do in the future. It is not a future filled with great deeds and glory. “No men are less dreamers than the citizens of democracies.” They have “the mental habits of the industrial and trading classes;” they are “calculating and realistic.” The love of money is “either the chief or a secondary motive at the bottom of everything the Americans do.”

The more alike everyone becomes, “the weaker each feels in the face of all.” Mistrusting their own judgment, everyone starts to believe that he “must be wrong when the majority hold the opposite view.” Majority opinion becomes the common opinion of the country, and, inevitably, “a sort of religion, with the majority as its prophet.” As public opinion “becomes more and more mistress of the world,” the majority gives the individual a supply of “ready made opinions,” with the result, Tocqueville insists, that there is “no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”

What can be done to prevent the loss of all standards, to prevent everyone from becoming part of the crowd, driven by their passions for equality and well-being, to surrender everything to a popular leader who, as an ancient writer described him, “becomes great through the people’s having authority in all matters, and through having authority themselves over the opinions of the people, since the multitude is persuaded by them?” What is to prevent, in other words, that “democratic despotism” Tocqueville was so concerned about? In chapter seventeen of the second book, the central chapter of Democracy In America, a chapter entitled “Why In Ages of Equality It Is Important To Set Distant Goals For Human Endeavors,” he suggests part of the answer.

When religion was the dominant force in the lives of men, great things were done, things that lasted. It took more than a hundred years to build some of the most famous French cathedrals. “In thinking of the other world, they had found out the great secret of success in this.” Religion, however, has “lost its sway over men’s minds…everything in the moral world seem doubtful and uncertain,” which makes it even more important, and more necessary, to teach that “nothing of lasting value is achieved without trouble.” How is this to be done when the love of comfort “has become the dominant national taste?” The answer is education, “for the age of blind sacrifice and instinctive virtues is already long past, and I see a time approaching in which freedom, public peace, and social stability will not be able to last without education.”

Tocqueville does not leave it with the simple statement that democracy requires an educated citizenry. What kind of education do the citizens of a democracy require? In chapter fifteen, entitled “Why The Study of Greek and Latin Literature Is Peculiarly Useful in Democratic Societies,” he argues that “No other literature puts in bolder relief just those qualities democratic writers tend to lack, and therefore no other literature is better to be studied at such times.” Despite this, instead of the classics, he insists that for most people in a democracy education “should be scientific, commercial and industrial, rather than literary.” Greek and Latin should be taught only to “those who are destined by nature or fate to adopt a literary career or to cultivate such tastes.” These are the people who will understand what greatness means, and knowing that, will be able to help protect democracy against its own worst instincts.

Democracy, as Tocqueville understood, allows everyone to live in whatever way they wish. Those who, instead of following the crowd, want to try to understand the world around them, can do so. In a memoir he never intended to make public, he confessed that the truth is so “precious and rare that once I have found it, I do not want to risk it in the hazard of an argument; I feel it is like a light that might be put out by waving it to and fro. And as to getting on good terms with people, I could not do so in any general or systematic fashion, for there are so few whom I recognize. Whenever there is nothing in a man’s thoughts or feelings that strikes me, I, so to speak, do not see him.” They are “like so many cliches. I respect them, for they make the world, but they bore me profoundly.”

Had he written this same thing in something he meant to publish, he might have written, more cautiously, what certain of the Greek and Latin authors he so much admired had written, that there are three kinds of human beings: a few who can understand things on their own, a few more who can understand things when they are explained, and the rest of us, unable to understand anything in the way we should. Tocqueville, who had the great good fortune to understand things on his own, had the generosity of mind to spend much of his life trying to explain to others what it is worthwhile knowing, not just about democracy and how to save it, but how those of us who live in a democracy should try to live.