The College Fix

For those of you who need a good brush up on Alexis de Tocqueville and how his iconic Democracy in America may be applied in America today, then noted conservative scholar Professor Steven Hayward’s recent post on Powerline is a must read.

Here’s a snapshot:

It’s not just the feds who are in on this culture of overregulation. Local governments can be just as bad, such as the Coralville, Iowa, police shutting down 4-year-old Abigail Krstinger’s sidewalk lemonade stand because she lacked a $400 city permit—a feat duplicated in Midway, Georgia; Appleton, Wisconsin; McAllen, Texas, and more than three dozen other cities across the country that were reported in the media. Some parents were slapped with $500 fines for allowing their kids to sell lemonade without the proper (expensive) permits. Local bureaucracies have even restricted or stopped annual Girl Scout cookie sales drives. …

… The climax of de Tocqueville’s argument is one of the best-known passages of his great book:

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends it arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Democracy in America was written nearly 200 years ago, and yet reading that “climax,” as Professor Hayward put it, is as disheartening as it is accurate.

The government is now our shepherd, and the great American human spirit is being crushed underneath.

Read more.

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