The relative chaos of the American class system was disorienting to Tocqueville. If the rich could so easily become poor and the poor could so easily become rich, how could anyone know where he stood? In European nations, “aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king,” Tocqueville wrote. And that chain, he believed, was a good thing. It kept a society bound together. The United States had lost the cohesion that comes with an aristocratic tradition, he warned: “Democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it.”
