Tocqueville helps explain the fear of losing freedom in a democracy

Everyone is on edge. Half the country is on edge but not in pain; the other half is on edge and in pain — symptoms that cut through body and soul.

A few days ago, I was startled by how immersed I had become in social media and by the conflicts that sprout from it. So I decided to take a theoretical step back. The idea is to try to explain, without offending anyone, why this half that walks around with a lump in its throat is suffering.

To do that, I will reach far, into the world of ideas, for one of the great heroes of my life: the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859). I am not sure where this text will end up. I only know that I want to say a few things I have not seen many people say.

Aristocracy and democracy

Tocqueville was an aristocrat who lost relatives to the guillotine during the French Revolution. His view is original and unique; I often say he is one of the great science-fiction authors I have ever read — and I love the genre.

In 1831 and 1832, he traveled to the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont to study the American penitentiary system. Back in France, he published the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835. The second came out in 1840 and is, for me, one of the most important books I have ever read. As Mario Quintana used to remind us, the classics wrote so well because there were no classics to get in their way.

To build his theory, Tocqueville simplified the world into two pure models — “ideal types,” as Max Weber would later put it. On one side, the aristocratic social state: there are lords and serfs, and those unequal positions are accepted as natural. On the other, the democratic social state, in which inequality stops being seen as natural.

Tocqueville saw equality as an overwhelming force, almost providential. Since the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries — above all the French one, of 1789 — we have lived in a democratic social state. Even the most mendacious politician promises to reduce poverty, distribute income and bring justice. Everyone’s discourse is the same.

In Brazil, however, aristocratic remnants persist. A French friend, François, spent some time with me in Curitiba. He was a bit of a freeloader — he returned my mother’s Ford Escort without gas, and the car died in the garage — but he had a sharp eye. Walking around the city, he marveled at the number of young people in the streets.

On the day he left, I asked what had impressed him most about Brazil. He thought for a moment, looked at me and answered: “Social elevator and service elevator.” (In Brazilian apartment buildings, the “social” elevator is for residents and visitors; the “service” elevator is for staff and deliveries.)

I recalled a scene in the building where I lived. An electrician was in the social elevator when a resident confronted him: did he not know there was an elevator for people like him? The worker even explained himself — the other one was broken. It is tragic. We live in a country where acceptance of injustice and inequality is still far too passive.

Democracy with or without freedom

There is a second part to the scheme. Democratic societies — all of ours, from here on — can function with freedom or without it. What sets them apart, for Tocqueville, is the strength of an existing and, better still, organized civil society.

The United States he visited had been colonized in a very different way from Brazil. In Raymundo Faoro’s reading, we were born as a business of the Portuguese state, producing for export to Europe. The Americans were born from the flight of people who wanted to build something free of the Europeans — with the advantage of a geography, in the north, that did not generate exportable products.

From the comparison with France, even more centralized on the king than Portugal, Tocqueville extracted two pure models. One is the democracy of a strong, centralized state, which oppresses and inhibits civil society. The other is the democracy that fosters a strong, organized and active civil society. Anyone who has ever tried to get a business permit in any Brazilian city knows which side we usually find ourselves on: that of the state that forbids and restrains.

In the United States he idealized — with all the injustices of the time, starting with slavery — there was encouragement for local institutions, elections for sheriff and a press in every town. It would be, he predicted, a more mediocre world, but a livelier one, and capable of generating impressive economic vigor.

That is why Tocqueville is a hero to liberals. I consider myself a Tocquevillian liberal. Simplifying a great deal, and looking for the good side of each, I would say that the right seeks freedom, and the left, freedom for all. Whoever intends to suppress freedom through a violent state, in my view, is no longer on the right but at its extreme.

Democracy without freedom is characterized by the absence of civil society. Individuals are pulverized, atomized, alone before the great father-state and, worse, before the tyranny of public opinion, which Tocqueville saw as a grave threat. People leave the public square, withdraw into their homes and appear only on election day, because voting is mandatory — and they vote for whoever someone told them to.

A modern state does the opposite: it creates conditions for people to do things. The Rouanet Law (Brazil’s federal cultural tax-incentive law), for example, waives part of the tax so that initiatives by people who bet on their own dreams multiply, generating income, product and culture. The original conception of Bolsa Família (the federal cash-transfer program), for its part, takes income where it is most needed. These are mechanisms that, in principle, any liberal would recognize. What is curious is that these programs are criticized while parliamentary earmarks that pay for concerts in small interior towns are tolerated, with no scrutiny at all.

The crossroads

I believe we are at the decisive crossroads of the great Tocquevillian dilemma. It is almost a role-playing game: we have reached the point where there is a single decision to make.

Returning to the aristocratic social state is not possible, but some seem openly to want it. Only now, inequalities would not be natural; they would have to be cultivated. Anyone who wanted, say, to take away women’s right to vote would have to seize the state and change the laws accordingly. I do not believe anyone in their right mind wants that. Still, it is startling to see voices defending similar ideas, here and in the United States.

The risk I see is that of a democracy without freedom, with civil society smothered. It starts by persecuting, with state support, certain religious beliefs or forms of gender organization. Then, the inspectors who try to preserve our biomes. Add to that the denial of climate change, or neglect of it.

While the debate fixates on bathrooms or on a trans athlete in volleyball — who follows hormonal protocols and is not even the strongest on the team — that agenda sends to Congress lawmakers with thousands of votes. And they will not concern themselves with climate, urban planning or justice.

I admit that the revulsion I feel at what seems absurd to me is the same that those on the other side feel at what they see on this side. But what is at stake is freedom, which Tocqueville defined as the possibility of taking part in public affairs.

My fear is concrete. I worry that the first demonstration against the measures of a future government will meet a very violent police — the same violence that already strikes the peripheries and specific layers of the population — now turned against our young people. It matters little which side you are on: a child of yours, or of someone you know, may be there and pay a very high personal price.

Doing things together

For years, I did activism in Curitiba, fighting so that a little square would not be torn down. Like everything in the city, a good part of those who stood beside me may well vote, today, on the other side. When you do something together, there are no sides. To end parliamentary earmarks or to create an urban vegetable garden, it matters little who each person votes for president.

The privatization of telephony is a good example of how something can reach every Brazilian’s hands. Before, whoever won the lottery invested in a landline; today, the cell phone is in everyone’s pocket, and each person uses it well or badly. It was through it that we fell into the algorithms and into polarization. We came to hate one another through the networks.

The more real life and things in common, the less hate. For that, people need to do things together, be in the streets, meet in the park and on the sidewalk. That is not even politics; it is urbanism. And any politics should practice it.

So far, I have had a nasty falling-out with only one person over this. I have never stopped going to the bar or the shop of friends who think differently, and I do not intend to. This kind of discrimination cannot be practiced in everyday life. It is with daily gestures that civil society is built. The only formula for fighting corruption is not swapping who is in power; it is pressuring at every level — and the ones who do that are civil society.

A swear word, a silly thing said on social media, passes. My fear is that, in the context that may come, a post could land someone in prison — or something worse, with the state’s approval. I think no one wants to run that risk.

If, after reflecting on Tocqueville’s dilemma, you keep your vote, that is your right. My choice is to preserve the chances of a democracy with freedom and participation. We will meet on the other side of all this, and I hope we can keep doing things together. Take care, all of you, on all sides — those in pain and those not in pain.