The United States that Tocqueville traversed and wrote about was an America of sovereign individual states and their dynamic townships and counties which served as the pulsating heart of the American spirit and experience. The federal government, as he later says, “is… the exception; the Government of the States is the rule.” That is, the federal government wasn’t the vibrant heart of the American Union. The individual states and their townships were. The federal government had few powers, as Tocqueville later goes on to describe, and merely existed to exercise “authority over the general interests of the country.”
When Tocqueville begins to describe the federal constitution of the United States, he observes much the same: “The attributes of the Federal Government were therefore carefully enumerated and all that was not included amongst them was declared to constitute a part of the privileges of the several Governments of the States. Thus the government of the States remained the rule, and that of the Confederation became the exception.” Tocqueville sees the same limited enumerated powers as did the Federalist Fathers who, in Federalist 45, wrote, “The powers delegated by the Constitution to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite.” Indeed, this near-anarchic absence of federal administration struck Tocqueville as an oddity: “Nothing is more striking to an European traveler in the United States than the absence of what we term the Government, or Administration. Written laws exist in America and one sees that they are daily executed; but although everything is in motion, the hand which gives the impulse to the social machine can nowhere be discovered.”
...If Alexis de Tocqueville were alive today and observing the situation of America, he would probably not be surprised that the democratic ethos of civil society, the township, and the autonomous local county have been crushed by the royal prerogatives of the executive and the administrative bureaucracy built around it....
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Originally Posted by Chris
