De Tocqueville had an egalitarian ideal of the United States, which would have been the view that naturally developed if his travel route was up around the Ohio River Valley and Kentucky. He expands countless pages talking about how there is no aristocracy in the United States, compared to a historical one in Europe that was then largely subsiding. But the irony of this was not lost to me. It was a strange thing that happened in history that de Tocqueville was describing, a land where the stratification of society was very limited for some time. The way he describes it, it seems that the citizenry really, seriously internalized the post-enlightenment ideals the founders had. But this condition seems to be a blip in history of barely a hundred years or so, because between the Gilded Age and the Wilson Era, a WASP elite aristocracy on the East Coast had taken control of the country. I suppose an egalitarian state of things cannot last long. The causes are outside the scope of de Tocqueville’s time, but it could have been predicted, in the same way he had incredibly accurate foresight and other predictions for America. If the white expansion was going to go all the way through the “second triangle”, there would have to be a powerful administration to rule over the filler-in-the-middle. But it probably didn’t occur to de Tocqueville because he was watching the aristocracies collapse in Europe, and was writing with that in mind, so proposing a new aristocracy arising in America would have been outside of scope.

Our contemporaries are ever a prey to two conflicting passions: they feel the need of guidance, and they long to stay free. Unable to wipe out these two contradictory instincts, they try to satisfy them both together. Their imagination conceives a government which is unitary, protective, and all-powerful, but elected by the people. Centralization is combined with the sovereignty of the people. That gives them a chance to relax. They console themselves for being under schoolmasters by thinking that they have chosen them themselves. each individual lets them put the collar on, for he sees that it is not a person, or a class of persons, but society itself which holds the end of the chain.

Under this system the citizens quit their state of dependence just long enough to choose their masters and then fall back into it.

A great many people nowadays very easily fall in with this brand of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people. They think they have done enough to guarantee personal freedom when it is to the government of the state that they have handed it over.

Vol. 2, Part 4, Ch. 6
Italics own.

Two contrary ideals are current among us, both equally fatal.

There is one lot of people who can see nothing in equality but the anarchical tendencies which it engenders. They are frightened of their own free will; they are afraid of themselves.

Others, who are fewer but more perceptive, take a different view. Beside the track which starts from equality and leads to anarchy, they have in the end discovered another road, which seems to lead inevitably to servitude. They shape their souls beforehand to suit this necessary servitude, and despairing of remaining free, from the bottom of their hearts they already worship the master who is bound soon to appear.

The former surrender liberty because they think it dangerous and the latter because they think it impossible.

Vol. 2, Part 4, Ch. 7
Italics own.

The despotic terror that he describes at the end of Volume 2, Part 4 did end up coming about, already rearing its head five years after he was writing. He was right on the money with it. The pattern he was describing was, democratic equality removes traditional hierarchies and meanings, creating spiritual anxiety and void.

When you have a mass of people in that void, in the same democratic crowd frenzy that the Israelites were in when Moses was gone, well, they’re gonna create a golden calf and worship it. Something so big and complex that they pour countless manhours and wealths into it, the most a civilization could possibly pour itself into up to the point of bleeding itself dry. It becomes an end in itself and an object of devotion, promising ultimate knowledge, control, and salvation. In the United States instead of the Biblical era, it takes the form of an administrative or technical project. A “golden calf” as I term it has at least three of these qualifications: (1) absorbs massive societal resources (2) becomes an object of quasi-religious devotion (3) leads to infighting in the country that built it or (4) consumes its creators. The Palantir/NSA/data center complex is the golden calf of today. Peter Theil’s Antichrist.¹ The Monolith. These projects that people will give up everything to work for are the clearest manifestations of the despotic centralized government overriding freedoms that de Tocqueville was talking about.

The first “golden calf” to emerge after de Tocqueville’s writings was in the form of the Transcontinental Railroad about five years later. It was first brought before Congress in 1845 and became a divisive topic that Congress kept talking about for decades afterwards, so much so that it even exacerbated North/South tensions before the Civil War.² The construction of it was a huge project that took a ton of resources and labor. Later golden calves include Teddy Roosevelt’s National Parks, which was a huge adminisitrative feat with no previous parallels to it; and Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, another unprecedented administrative feat that was so divisive in the US that it ended up not joining it, and it can even be said it ended his career. I am reluctant to include typical infrastructure projects because people do that anyways, and war mobilizations, because it’s very hard to point at that, or harder than other types of administrative feats. And all of these emerge from a democratic system giving equals nothing to do so they give up their freedoms to build something crazy. There have certainly been other “golden calves” since then - but I only mention the earliest ones to show soon after de Tocqueville they emerged.

The golden calf is a much better thing to point to when trying to demonstrate that an all-powerful administrative state is destroying the freedoms of the individuals and micromanaging them, compared to the bogeyman “deep state”, and is a great thing to point to when talking about “The Cathedral”³.

Today’s golden calves are these very large computer systems. How many “appeals to Palantir” (or appeals against Palantir) have you heard in current political discourse? How many stupid criticisms have you heard of datacenters using too much water? Yet still, Trump will make federal lands available and remove regulations for these projects⁴, and these massive projects will take your freedom and your land and your jobs.

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2 So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” 6 And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

Exodus 32:1-6

Vol. 2, Part 1, Ch. 6 “Concerning the Progress of Roman Catholicism in the United States” is 6 paragraphs in the translation. A line from it:

Catholicism seen from the inside seems to be losing, but seen from the outside, to be gaining.

This has not changed in 200 years. The Catholic Church cannot have a member turn to an unbeliever without it being a scandal, and the Church in America is surrounded on all sides by a very different branch of the Christianity cladogram. But the Catholic Church presents the only united religious front in America, compared to many splintering Protestant denominations, and the Protestants see that as a threat. My own experience growing up mirrored this exactly. Every other week the priest would lament about the pews becoming emptier over the years, then talk about how they had 40 or so new RCIA converts this year; and, when I was Catholic, whenever I would reveal myself to be a Catholic to a non-Catholic, it was usually met with suspicion. That quote was true at the time of the Founding Fathers, was true when de Tocqueville was writing, was true when Kennedy was the only Catholic president, and is true today. This year the American Pope gave an address at Jubilee events about social media,⁵ which I don’t think will change anything at all because that is a vehicle which both draws out members by simply showing them what else the world has to offer, and draws in new ones because the Catholics self-reinforce as the largest united religious front, now online.

De Tocqueville, a Catholic himself, predicts that the Catholic Church would gain in America, but that never came to pass, and it instead remained at his first observation.

I fear China is too culturally incompatible with the United States to “run the world” or be a successor state to the United States in the event that the US dramatically subsides, where the US will cooperate with it (like how Europe went along with the US becoming its ruling superpower). Really, this should be obvious. They have their own completely separate history of thousands of years, after all. But it would be very ugly if such a conflict happened. Of course, this is thinking ahead of the First Island Chain, but it is such a danger that it needs to be mentioned. Both mentions of China in Volume II of D.I.A. perfectly illustrate that irreconcilable cultural incompatibility.

Three hundred years ago, when the first Europeans came to China, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of improvement, and they were surprised that, having come so far, they had not gone further. Later on they found traces of profound knowledge that had been forgotten. The nation was a hive of industry; the greater part of its scientific methods were still in use, but science itself was dead. That made them understand the strange immobility of mind found among this people. The Chinese, following in their fathers' steps, had forgotten the reasons which guided them. They still used the formula without asking why. They kept the tool but had no skill to adapt or replace it. So the Chinese were unable to change anything. They had to drop the idea of improvement. They had to copy their ancestors the whole time for fear of straying into impenetrable darkness if they deviated a moment from their tracks. Human knowledge had almost dried up at the fount, and though the stream still flowed, it could neither increase nor change its course.

China nonetheless had existed in peace for centuries; her conquers had adopted her mores; order prevailed. Material prosperity of a sort was visible everywhere. Revolutions were very rare and war, one might almost say, unknown.

We therefore should not console ourselves by thinking that the barbarians are still a long way off. Some people may let the torch be snatched from their hands, but others stamp it out themselves.

Vol. 2, Part 1, Ch. 10

To make the last paragraph’s context clear, he is not calling the Chinese barbarians, instead earlier he was talking about how the barbarians destroyed Rome; the second part of the last sentence is the point he is making about the Chinese. All the same, de Tocqueville would agree that we should not think of the enemy as a long way off.

His point hasn’t changed in the last 200 years at all! America innovates, China replicates.

Further:

In China, where equality has for a very long time been carried to great lengths, no man graduates from one public office to another without passing an examination. He has to face this test at every state of his career, and the idea is now so deeply rooted in the manners of the people that I remember reading a Chinese novel in which the hero, after many ups and downs, succeeds at last in touching his mistress' heart by passing an examination well.

Vol. 2, Part 3, Ch. 19

Do I have to explain why this is bad? Do you think (same thing but Indian) Vivek Ramaswamy gets it? What a tragedy it would be if these became the world’s ruling powers!