I was thinking about De Tocqueville and his idea of centralized government. He was very wary of a centralized government throughout the second book; to him, voluntary associations are what check the government, not small government controlled associations. It seems as if he would not have been happy with America during the early 20th century. During this time period FDR created a lot of government run organizations in order to thwart the depression. In a way, he set a standard that we carried through to our current time period. I wonder what De Tocqueville would have to say about that...
In my APUSH class junior year we read this book called America's Threee Regimes, which described three major social "regimes" from America's founding to the present (who'd of thought that from the title?). The final one was entitled the "Populist-beaurocratic regime". The author discussed this movement towards bureaucracy, which De Tocqueville would probably frown at. But what about the populism portion? The promotion of the people as a movement runs right in line with what DT supported. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding populism... perhaps it's very individualistic in nature, and wouldn't even incorporate groups...
This is the broad point I was trying to make in class. I don't know if I made it any clearer here.
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