https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/10/tocqueville-in-arabia-the-anxieties-of-the-democratic-age/
This essay is adapted from the new paperback edition of Tocqueville in Arabia: The Anxieties of the Democratic Age, by Joshua Mitchell (Encounter, 236 pp., $19.99.
The American mood, giddy and triumphal after the 1991 Gulf War, darkened into intermixed rage and despair after the ghastly live-broadcast death spectacle in New York and Washington, D.C., on that sun-lit morning of September 11, 2001. What followed in the way of primitive, not to say unjustified, retribution in the distant mountains and high plateaus of Afghanistan soon transformed and metastasized.
Thin is the line between commensurate response and pride. On April 9, 2003, less than 19 months later, Baghdad fell to American forces who were now at war with two nations, markedly different from one another, each an inscrutable mystery to our military, to our intelligence agencies, and to all but a few remaining academics who had been trained before gaming and simulations came to constitute due diligence. They do not.
Tocqueville is well-known for having invented the idea of American exceptionalism. There, in the author’s introduction to his 1835 masterpiece, Democracy in America, he announced that the term does not mean America is special. It means that America is the exception to the rule. What is the rule? The rule is that all the world now has, or once had, aristocratic social conditions. Not least, the Middle East, I add. America is the exception.
America was born into democratic social conditions, more or less. This difference has momentous implications we must understand if we wish our nation to act wisely in the world. The vast swath of the world that retains its aristocratic social conditions, or is in some transitional phase away from them, will see in America both a rosy promise of liberation from the burden of its own aristocratic past and the haunting prospect of a disorderly, lonely, decadent, Godless future.