How Alexis de Tocqueville explains Democratic Party conformity

Whichever spin you accept, it’s hard to argue with George Packer’s characterization in the Atlantic: “The same forced unity that gave Biden the primaries despite his obvious infirmity will give Harris the nomination despite her well-known weaknesses.” Does this historic transition, and the air of compulsion about it, demonstrate democracy at its best — or something more sinister, even a “coup”?

Maybe both. Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century chronicler and critic of American democracy, argued that herd-like uniformity of opinion is a feature of popular government as much as of dictatorships. Instead of encouraging freedom of thought, democracy can encourage people to bend their opinions to conform to those of their peers. Tocqueville’s account of political conformity in “Democracy in America” (1835) helps elucidate the Democratic Party’s recent convulsions.

Tocqueville described small-d democratic deliberation like this: “As long as the majority is still undecided discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, a submissive silence is observed, and the friends, as well as the opponents, of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety.”

So it goes in the Democratic Party: For most of the time Biden was running, the question appeared to be settled and silence reigned. And when Harris was “irrevocably pronounced” his successor by party elites, any prospect for a competitive nomination process — much-discussed in the period of uncertainty about Biden’s future — suddenly disappeared. Various politicians could have made a play for the nomination, but as Tocqueville reminds us, a politician who impertinently challenges a political majority “has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success.”

It can be dizzying, for an outsider, to see the Democratic Party and its allied institutions walk in lockstep — promoting a fiction that Biden “passed the torch” voluntarily, suspending scrutiny of Harris’s policy positions, reveling in emotions and “vibes.” But Tocqueville emphasized how democracy is not always amenable to a diversity of opinions: Instead, the majority’s pressure “acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.” Within a political party, as Democrats are demonstrating in Chicago this week, this can be a great benefit.

Tocqueville was observing America several decades after its founding, and he regretted that there were fewer American political figures with the “candor” and “independence of opinion which frequently distinguished the Americans in former times.” The country’s leaders increasingly followed rather than led, a pattern that continues, with rare exceptions (Dean Phillips!), to this day.

The tendency of Democratic politicians to conform was a strength when it enabled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to usher legislation through a narrowly divided House (even as the fractious House GOP could barely govern itself with a similar margin). Democratic Party conformity looked like a weakness when it let Biden glide through the 2024 primaries without serious opposition, but it is turning out to be a strength again as the party and allied institutions unify behind Harris.

So the question whether the Democratic Party’s switcheroo reflects a triumph for democracy or a dystopian exercise of political command-and-control misses the point, because those two aren’t mutually exclusive. Controlling political thought can be ugly, and its results surreal — but Tocqueville saw that monopolizing opinion was inseparable from mass democracy. Thus the Democrats and parts of the media effortlessly quashed complaints about Biden when he was their candidate, and effortlessly forgot Harris’s flaws as they summoned new mass enthusiasm around her.

The unity of the Democratic Party and liberal institutions has helped generate real popular energy behind Harris that could carry her to victory. But Tocqueville also had a warning about the fickleness of democracy: “As the majority is the only power which it is important to court, all its projects are taken up with the greatest ardor, but no sooner is its attention distracted than all this ardor ceases.” Blue America has an extraordinary capacity to create conformity within its ranks; the greatest risk to it in the run-up to the election is not dissent, but distraction.