Tocqueville Saw It in 1831, Comebacks Are Built in Associations, Not Ads

A young French magistrate stepped off a ship in Newport, Rhode Island, in May 1831, supposedly to study American prisons. He wrote a report on prisons. Then he wrote a book about everything else, and it turned out to be the best book on American life ever written by a foreigner. He is the only man in the history of government travel who came to inspect the jails and left having understood the country.

His name was Alexis de Tocqueville, and the thing he noticed first, the thing that shocked a man raised in a France where the state did everything, was that Americans, when they saw a problem, did not wait for the government. They formed a committee.

That is the subject here. The argument is that the durable comebacks of the American right were built the way Tocqueville saw Americans build everything else: in associations, one meeting at a time, and not in advertising. I hold that view as a matter of constitutional principle as much as political strategy, and I will make the case in order.

The journey and the book

Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont traveled the United States for about nine months, from May 1831 to February 1832. They traveled as far as the Michigan frontier and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. They were officially commissioned by the French government to study the American penitentiary system, and they did produce a report on it. But Tocqueville's real project was to understand what democracy would do to a society, and America was the only place where it had been tried at scale.

Democracy in America appeared in two parts: the first volume in 1835 and the second in 1840. The first volume is mostly about American political institutions: townships, the federal structure, the courts. The second is about the habits of the heart that democracy produces: individualism, the love of equality, the dangers of a mild and pervasive state.

The two volumes are connected by an idea. Tocqueville feared that equality, which he believed unstoppable, would leave individuals isolated and weak, each one alone before a central power. The American solution, which struck him as nearly unique, was the association.

What he saw: associations everywhere

In the second volume he observed that Americans of all ages, conditions and dispositions were constantly forming associations. Some were commercial and industrial. Some were religious, moral, serious or frivolous. They built inns, founded seminaries, raised churches, distributed books and sent missionaries overseas. When they wanted to promote a truth or encourage a view, he said, they did not look to a government or a great lord. They found each other and formed a society.

His explanation was simple and shrewd. In an aristocracy, a single great man can do a thing alone, because he has wealth and standing. In a democracy, each citizen is individually weak. He can do almost nothing alone. If he does not learn to combine, he will be helpless, and the only strong party in sight will be the state. So the science of association, he wrote, is the mother of science, the one on which the progress of all the rest depends.

You can read the same idea from another angle in The Little Platoons Passage From 1790 and What It Asks of Us Now, where Burke argues that attachment to the small group is the root of public affection. Burke, writing in 1790, had put it this way in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections." Tocqueville gave that principle a landscape. Burke's platoons turned out to be a thousand American townships.

The argument, in numbered premises

Here is how I would build the case, with the premises numbered so you can check each.

1. A free people needs more than a vote and a state. Between the individual and the government there must be something. If there is nothing, the government fills the space.
2. Associations are the something. Churches, clubs, local committees, charities, civic groups and councils teach people to cooperate, to argue, to run a meeting and to keep a treasurer honest.
3. Political movements are borrowed from those habits. A candidate who wins with a mailing list and no one to walk a precinct has a victory that cannot be maintained. A movement with associations underneath it can survive a loss.
4. Therefore the durable political comebacks are the ones built in associations.

Premise four is the claim that needs evidence, and I turn to it now.

1966: the volunteers who stayed

The Republican defeat of 1964 was enormous. Barry Goldwater lost the presidency to Lyndon Johnson, and Republicans lost 36 House seats. Conventional wisdom declared the conservative wing finished.

What was left behind was a network. Goldwater's campaign had drawn a generation of volunteers, many of them young, many of them new to politics, and a conservative movement of local groups had grown up around it: the Young Americans for Freedom, founded in 1960 at William F. Buckley's home in Sharon, Connecticut, with its Sharon Statement; chapters of grassroots Republican clubs; local committees of volunteers who had licked envelopes in 1964 and were not going to stop.

In 1966 Republicans gained 47 House seats, 3 Senate seats and a large net number of governorships, and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California. Notice what drove it: a reaction to the governing party's excesses, certainly, but also an organized base that was already in place and already knew how to knock on a door. For the story in full, see Two Years After Goldwater, the 1966 Midterm That Put the Right Back in It. The comeback was not an ad campaign. It was an inheritance of clubs.

1980: the churches, the councils and the think tanks

The 1980 election is often described as a triumph of a candidate and a message. I would say that it was also a triumph of infrastructure.

Part of it was intellectual. A generation of magazines and policy shops had spent years developing the arguments that a candidate could then carry. Part of it was religious. In the late 1970s evangelical and Catholic organizations, many of them built from local congregations, began to enter politics in numbers; the Moral Majority was organized in 1979, to take one example, and it gathered members through church networks rather than through national advertising. Part of it was fiscal. The taxpayer revolt of 1978 had produced a network of local tax-limitation groups. And part of it was a decade of conservative candidates who had built their careers in the local councils, the legislatures and the party committees.

The point is structural. When Ronald Reagan won in November 1980, and Republicans won control of the Senate for the first time since the 1950s, the machinery that delivered those votes had been built before the campaign began. The longer story is in The Ideas Came First, How Magazines and Think Tanks Built the 1980 Landslide.

2010: the town halls and the Tax Day gatherings

The third example is the most recent. After 2008 the right was at a low. Then, beginning in early 2009, ordinary citizens began holding local meetings, many of them organized by people with no political experience: a few neighbors in a living room, a Tax Day rally in April, a town hall where a representative was asked a hard question. These groups called themselves by many names, and they had no central command.

In the 2010 midterm Republicans gained 63 seats in the House, the largest swing in a House election since 1948, and gained six seats in the Senate. The wave was real. And a large part of what gave it force was that the voters were not just reacting; they had organized, and they knew whom to call. The pattern repeats: a loss, a local reorganization, a comeback.

I note that this account is not partisan flattery. Left-leaning organizations also build from associations, and the lesson is not about who has the better clubs. The lesson is about where durable political power comes from.

Soft despotism: what happens when associations die

Tocqueville was also a prophet of what happens if the associations fail. In the last chapters of the second volume he described a kind of government he thought democracies were prone to. It would not be a tyranny of the old sort, with chains and a lash. It would be, in his words in the standard English translation, "absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild." It would resemble parental authority if its aim were to prepare people for adulthood; instead it would try to keep them in a perpetual childhood. It would be content to see citizens enjoy themselves, so long as they thought of nothing but enjoying themselves. It would provide for their security, foresee and supply their needs, direct their industry, manage their inheritances. In short, it would spare them the care of thinking and the trouble of living.

That is soft despotism, and it comes about by degrees. Each step is small: a program here, a regulation there, a benefit that nobody refuses. Citizens who have no associations have nothing to stand between themselves and the power that offers to take care of them. See Tocqueville Saw Soft Despotism Coming, a Power That Never Says No for a longer reading.

The link to politics is direct. A movement that is a collection of individual consumers of political content, each watching alone, is a movement of the isolated. Isolated people are easy to organize from above and hard to organize from below. A movement of associations is the opposite.

The steelman: money and media win elections

Now the strongest objection, and I want to state it the way a campaign professional would. Modern elections, he says, are won by money and media. A Senate race costs tens of millions. A candidate who cannot afford television does not get heard. The idea that comebacks are built by Elks lodges and church basements is a nice story that has nothing to do with how races are won. Associations are what you do when you cannot afford advertising.

That deserves a real answer, and here is mine, in four points.

1. Advertising reaches voters; associations create them. An ad can tell a person who to vote for. It cannot make the person care enough to vote when it rains. A person who is part of a group that meets, argues and organizes turns out. Campaign professionals know this: the field operation, the volunteer list and the get-out-the-vote effort are all association-building.
2. Money follows organization. Donors give where there is a viable effort, and a viable effort is one with people on the ground. The 1966 volunteers, the 1980 church networks and the 2010 local groups did not follow the money. The money followed them.
3. Money is often the symptom of a movement, not its cause. The Supreme Court held in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) that independent political expenditures by corporations and unions are protected speech. Whatever you think of that, the outcome in 2010 did not turn on advertising alone, because the groups that produced the wave were local and many had little money.
4. Media is now cheap and everywhere, which raises the value of the scarce thing. When anyone can post a video, the scarce thing is not attention but trust, and trust is built in person, by neighbors, in groups.

None of this means money and media do not matter. They matter. The claim is that they are the amplifier, and an amplifier with nothing plugged into it makes only noise.

What the Constitution says about associations

The First Amendment protects "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances." Note the verbs. The right is to assemble and to petition. The Founders listed the right to form associations beside speech and religion, because they understood that a free people acts together. For the full text see the Constitution.

There is also a structural point. A federal republic built on states, counties and townships presumes local associations. The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states and to the people the powers not delegated. The people's share of those powers is exercised through local institutions, and when those institutions decline, the share goes up the ladder. The case for federalism is, in part, a case for keeping the training grounds open. See Federalism Lets Fifty States Experiment, and the Constitution Planned It for that argument.

How to build one

Here is the practical bit, because Tocqueville's insight is only useful if it is put to work.

• Join something that meets. A church, a Rotary or Kiwanis club, a parent-teacher group, a county party committee, a neighborhood association, a gun club, a veterans' post.
• Show up on a schedule. The habit matters more than the enthusiasm. A group that meets every second Tuesday outlasts a group that meets when someone feels inspired.
• Learn the offices. Know who sits on the city council, the school board and the county commission, and when they meet. Attend one session before you speak at one. See Know Your Neighbors' Names, the Small Habit That Holds a Republic Together.
• Take a job. Secretary, treasurer, door-knocker. The person who takes the minutes shapes the agenda.
• Invite someone who disagrees. Associations that only contain agreement become echo chambers, and the point of the exercise is to practice the art of living with citizens who see it differently. See Talking Politics With a Neighbor Who Disagrees, a Persuasion Playbook.

The case in brief

1. Tocqueville, traveling America from May 1831 to February 1832 and publishing Democracy in America in 1835 and 1840, found that Americans solve public problems by forming voluntary associations.
2. He warned that when citizens lose the habit of association, a mild and pervasive state, the soft despotism he described, takes their place.
3. The durable conservative comebacks of 1966, 1980 and 2010 were built on local networks of volunteers, congregations, councils and civic groups before the campaigns began.
4. The objection that money and media decide elections is half right: they amplify an organization, but they do not create the people who turn up.
5. The First Amendment protects the right to assemble and petition, and the Tenth keeps the training grounds of local government open.

What you can do: join one group that meets in person this month, and volunteer for one job in it.