Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

In the United States it is so easy to create an independent existence for oneself that to take from an official the place that he occupies is sometimes to remove the ease from his life, but never the means of sustaining it.

one thing on which this power exerts a great influence,

external politics:

The more a people finds itself in a precarious and perilous position, and the more the need for continuity and fixity is felt in the direction of external affairs, the more also the application of the system of election to the head of state becomes dangerous.

Whatever may be the prerogatives with which the executive power is vested, one ought always to consider the time immediately preceding the election and during it as a period of national crisis.

The more troubled the internal situation of a country and the greater its external perils, the more dangerous is this moment of crisis for it.

In America, society is so constituted that it can sustain itself without aid; external dangers are never pressing there. The election of the president is a cause of agitation, not of ruin.

MODE OF ELECTION

The problem to solve was to find the mode of election that, while expressing the real will of the people, hardly excited their passions and held them in the least possible suspense.

It is rare, in fact, to see a man gather a majority of votes in a great people at the first stroke. The difficulty increases in a republic of confederated states, where local influences are much more developed and more powerful.

To get around this second obstacle, the means presented itself of delegating the electoral powers of the nation to a body that represented it.

This mode of election rendered a majority more probable; for the fewer the electors, the easier it is for them to agree. It also presented more ...

But ought one to have entrusted the right to elect to the legi...

or, on the contrary, should an electoral college have been formed whose sole object was to proceed to th...

The Americans preferred this la...

They thought that the men they sent to make ordinary laws would only incompletely represent the voice of the people in regard to ...

being elected for more than one year, they could have represented a will th...

They judged that if they charged the legislature with electing the head of the executive power, its members would become, long before the election, objects of cor...

They therefore established that each state would name a certain number of electors,20 who in their turn would elect the president.

The mode of election in two stages rendered a majority probable, but did not assure it,

This case presenting itself, they were necessarily brought to take one of these three measures: either they had to have new electors named, consult again those already named, or, finally, defer the choice to a new authority.

They therefore settled on the third,

House of Representatives would proceed immediately by itself to the election;

could only elect one of the three candidates who had obtained the most votes.22

As we see, it is only in a rare case, difficult to foresee in advance, that the election is entrusted to the ordinary representatives of the nation, and still they can only choose a citizen already...

for the majority in the House of Representatives could in its turn be doubtful, and this time the Constitution offered no remedy.

CRISIS OF THE ELECTION

the president is absorbed by the care of defending himself. He no longer governs in the interest of the state, but in that of his reelection; he prostrates himself before the majority and often, instead of resisting its passions, as his duty obliges him to do, he runs to meet its caprices.

As the election approaches, intrigues become more active, agitation more lively and more widespread.

ON THE REELECTION OF THE PRESIDENT

Intrigue and corruption are vices natural to elective governments. But when the head of state can be reelected, the vices spread indefinitely and compromise the very existence of the country.

it is the state itself, with its immense resources, that intrigues and corrupts.

The principle of reelection therefore renders the corrupting influence of elective governments more extensive and more dangerous. It tends to degrade the political morality of the people and to replace patriotism with cleverness.

in countries where democracy governs and where the people constantly attract everything to themselves, laws that render their action more and more prompt and irresistible attack the existence of the government in a direct manner.

Reeligible

the president of the United States is only a docile instrument in the hands of the majority.

Thus, in order not to deprive the state of the talents of one man, they have rendered those talents almost useless; and in order to provide a resource for extraordinary circumstances, they have exposed the country to dangers every day.

ON THE FEDERAL COURTS

Judicial institutions exert a great influence on the destiny of the Anglo-Americans;

Governments generally have only two means of defeating the resistance that the governed oppose to them: the material force that they find in themselves; the moral force that the decrees of courts lend to them.

The great object of justice is to substitute the idea of right for that of violence; to place intermediaries between the government and the use of material force.

A federal government ought more than any other to desire to obtain the support of justice, because in its nature it is weaker, and one can more easily organize resistance against it.

All the judicial power of the Union was concentrated in a single tribunal, called the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Supreme Court of the United States was therefore vested with the right to decide all questions of competence.

That was the most dangerous blow delivered to the sovereignty of the states. In this way it was restricted not only by the laws, but also by the interpretation of laws;

Yet the dangers with which this manner of proceeding seemed to threaten the sovereignty of the states were not as great in reality as they appeared to be.

Federal judges feel the relative weakness of the power in the name of which they act, and they are closer to abandoning a right of jurisdiction in cases where the law gives it to them than being inclined to claim it illegally.

there were certain litigants who could only be judged by the federal courts, whatever the object of the case might be.

there were certain cases that could only be decided by these same courts, whatever the character of the litigants might be.

The person and the matter therefore became the two bases of ...