Democracy in America

Tocqueville argues that popular sovereignty and press freedom are intimately linked:

The sovereignty of the people and freedom of the press are therefore two entirely correlative things: censorship and universal suffrage are, on the contrary, two things that contradict each other and cannot be found in the political institutions of the same people for long (174).

Americans accept press freedom because criticisms of the law are permissible. More fundamentally, they reject the idea that any court could be objective enough to criticize a newspaper and control it.

Though press freedom is entrenched, Tocqueville argues that the press is “weak” because the country as a whole is “rarely troubled by profound passions” (175). He notes that newspapers contain many more advertisements in the United States than French newspapers do. More significantly, it is very easy to found a newspaper in America, so they proliferate in all parts of the country and are not centralized. Consequently, “[n]ewspapers in the United States […] cannot establish great currents of opinion that sweep away or overflow the most powerful dikes” (175). Unlike French journalists, American ones work “without art” and do not engage deep political matters (177). But in the end, newspapers still act as forces for party politics and unite disparate groups; “through it they speak to each other without seeing each other and understand each other without being put in contact” (178). Newspapers in agreement with each other can still shape national trends, provided enough of them move in the same direction on an issue.

Tocqueville considers the American tendency to form associations to address social problems or work toward common goals particularly well developed, noting that Americans “associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals” (180). Associations help people clarify their opinions and expand their activity in support of their beliefs, including in the political realm. Tocqueville asserts, “In America, the freedom to associate for political goals is unlimited,” noting that political associations formed around the question of tariffs and trade policy in the 1830s (182). Tocqueville considers political associations, especially those organized around minority opinions, as important counterweights to the “omnipotence of the majority” (183).

As is his wont, Tocqueville contrasts European and American views of associations. He argues that Europeans see them as “a weapon of war that one forms in haste to go try it out immediately on a field of battle,” while American associations work to convince the majority of their view (184). They “are therefore peaceful in their objects and legal in their means” (185). Americans are, by temperament and affiliation with English tradition, interested in associations to convince, not to attack. This is partly because suffrage is widespread in the United States; associations cannot claim the moral authority of a majority view when voter participation is widespread. Associations in Europe adopt a militant character, where in the United States they serve as a counterbalance to Tocqueville’s anxieties about majoritarian popular rule.