Tocqueville's forgotten solution to America's democratic crisis

The Hill

21-06-2025

To save our democracy, the 19th-century French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville would tell us, start a book club. Join a church. Or, perhaps most crucially, volunteer at a local school or run for school board. The specific activity matters less — what's essential is coming together with fellow citizens for a common purpose.
This may sound inconsequential when compared to the present challenges to our democracy, but it's rooted in Tocqueville's penetrating observations of early America. Having witnessed his own relatives falling to the guillotine during the French Revolution, he understood democracy's dangers as well as its promise. In 1831, he journeyed to America to study its democratic experiment and distill lessons to guide France's turbulent political evolution.
What he saw amazed him.
'Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,' he wrote. They gathered in churches, town halls, libraries, charitable organizations, colleges and more. He watched Americans resolving disputes, pursuing shared goals across partisan lines, and investing in one another—practicing democracy. These local, face-to-face acts that were possible only in the emerging democratic social order trained citizens to act collectively and formed counterweights to centralized authority and to mass movements.
Yet this civic vitality did not emerge spontaneously: Education, Tocqueville argued, was its vital seedbed. 'It cannot be doubted,' Tocqueville wrote, 'that in the United States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic.' Early American colleges aimed to form citizens, not just workers. They taught not only practical skills but also the art of self-governance.
Education forms citizens. Citizens, working together, create and sustain democracy.
Today, we're headed the wrong way. When education becomes a partisan battlefield — through defunding universities, constraining academic inquiry, or promoting ideological conformity on campuses — we undermine a fundamental democratic institution, one that is especially critical to build the next generation's ability to practice democracy. History is clear: When authoritarianism or ideological conformity rises, liberal education is an early target.
And it is exactly liberal education, the institution freely trading ideas vital to nourishing democracy, that must be defended and grown. Democrats and Republicans alike, and too many educational institutions themselves, tend to measure education's value exclusively by graduates' salaries, not by their value to the health of the republic. This undervalues education's purpose in democracy.
Education must remain steadfast in its role as a cornerstone of democracy, not just as a pathway to prosperity.
At St. John's College, where I am president, we uphold the root meaning of liberal education— the education that frees. This is the education America needs now. Our 'great books' curriculum brings students together around a seminar table to discuss texts reflecting every pole of our society's political, religious, and moral axes, from Aristotle to Baldwin, Adam Smith to Marx, Aquinas to Nietzsche.
This education is at least as broad as the range of our society's fundamental values, because these texts are the sources or classic statements of those values. This breadth of inquiry explodes ideological bubbles, requiring students to consider ideas they would usually dismiss. Students must articulate reasoned positions and listen attentively even to those they disagree with, working together to reach deeper understanding. Each seminar table really becomes a miniature republic, where ideas clash but people cooperate — a model that can thrive in settings from community colleges to public high schools to neighborhood book clubs.
When students wrestle with Aristotle's Politics or Locke's Second Treatise, they engage with foundational questions of self-governance. When they read Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, they develop empathy and moral imagination — capacities that counteract the dehumanization of opponents that fuels hyper-partisanship and degrades democracy. When they read Euclid or Einstein, they develop habits of logical reasoning and the ability to weigh evidence.
These texts develop precisely the capacities Tocqueville identified as essential for civic health in a democracy.
Most importantly, liberal education nurtures what Tocqueville called 'self-interest rightly understood'—the recognition that individual flourishing depends on collective wellbeing. This perspective counters the narrow self-interest that undermines civic friendship. By engaging with texts across centuries and cultures in community, students discover their own interests are bound up with a broader human collective.
The decline in civic engagement that Tocqueville would have found alarming is all too familiar in contemporary America. In 2000, Robert Putnam's 'Bowling Alone' documented a civic withdrawal that has helped lead to our weakened democratic institutions. Yuval Levin's 'A Time to Build' updated this argument in 2020 and challenged us to renew our institutions.
Church membership fell from 70 percent in 2000 to 47 percent in 2020. In 2018, for the first time, less than half of households reported any charitable giving. Union membership reached a record low of 9.9 percent in 2024. And we have now seen a profound collapse in confidence in our institutions of higher education.
This civic vacuum isn't just unfortunate — it is dangerous. We become strangers to one another, vulnerable to manipulation and increasingly unable to distinguish fact from fiction.
Here's the challenge: Our democracy is eroding rapidly, and civic culture builds slowly. And Tocqueville warns us that there is no shortcut. 'In democratic countries, the art of association is the mother of art; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made.' Democratic preservation requires both immediate work to counter democratic breakdown and long-term investment in our civic infrastructure.
So don't allow the chaos of national politics to paralyze or overwhelm you. Tocqueville reminds us that democracy is not only defended in courtrooms and capitals—its living roots are in living rooms, classrooms and local halls. Go to a city council meeting. Volunteer at the library. Champion liberal education. When we do so, we quietly stitch the fabric of our democracy—thread by thread, action by action — before it unravels beyond repair.
J. Walter Sterling is the President of St. John's College in Santa Fe.