LIBERTY AND EQUALITY, LIKE A LONG-MARRIED and cantankerous old couple, are often spoken of as inseparable, but in fact they seem rarely to get along in public. Invoked frequently together (and only sometimes accompanied by equality’s ancient sibling, “fraternity”), they form the core aspirations of modern liberal democracy, yet often seem more at odds with one another than intimate partners in a common endeavor. During times that equality is particularly strong, liberty feels threatened; when liberty is ascendant, equality feels slighted. Much contemporary political theorizing as well as current policy debate resembles marriage counseling of a sort, aimed at trying to balance the claims of each, without causing one to cede too much ground to the other.
Cautionary tales about the dire consequences of their separation abound: in a world of unleashed liberty and waning equality, the results are portrayed as a nightmare inspired by Nietzsche, or perhaps worse still, Ayn Rand—a dreamscape populated by elite supermen and superwomen who would remake the world in their own image with little regard for the claims and concerns of lesser mortals. Under the threat of enforced equality, Atlas shrugs: anyone able to devise a safe landing deserves her just deserts, the rest of the world be damned.
Invert the two by displacing liberty for equality, and this libertarian fantasy becomes a libertarian nightmare. In a phantasmagoria as frightening as the dystopic wish for infinite liberty, the conformist threat posed by the desire for perfect equality results in a portrait of human misery rather than a fond realization of democratic dreams. Kurt Vonnegut gave us a taste of this nightmare in his 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which begins: “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.”11xKurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron,” Welcome to the Monkey House (New York: Dell, 1968) 7. Thanks to the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments that mandate total equality, and an aggressive State that enforces their provisions, there are no longer inequalities of any sort: physical, intellectual, or aesthetic. The office of the Handicapper General is charged with “correcting” all natural inequalities by equalizing—i.e., “handicapping”—any person of above-average capabilities. Therefore, a strong person is loaded down with sandbags; a beautiful person is fitted with a mask, the ugliness of which is proportionate with that person’s beauty; an intelligent person is equipped with a headset that interrupts, by means of a loud noise, whatever thought sequence that person is attempting to put together. The necessary outcome of this egalitarian nightmare is a State apparatus proportionally as large and encompassing as Robert Nozick’s ideal liberal State is minimalist.
And so the ebb and flow of this ancient struggle in the marriage between equality and liberty has proceeded: with the rising tide of equality, government is charged with extensive duties and expansive powers; in response, liberty’s defenders call for a shrinking of the State and willingly sacrifice some of equality’s gains; and so on. America’s political parties, and indeed partisan arrangements of many of the world’s liberal democracies, alternate between supporting one spouse or the other, never wholly to the exclusion of the other, but always with greater sympathy for one at the expense of the other. And the public itself seems to change sides with some regularity, indicating at once the legitimacy of each side in the public’s mind, an awareness of the dangers of excess on each side, and perhaps a certain amount of prudence in attempting to balance its mutual allegiance to liberty and equality.
Liberty and equality are held to be important ends of democratic life, yet are understood as well to serve further ends or public purposes that are deemed central to the flourishing of a democratic citizenry. Liberty furthers other goals, such as autonomy, mobility, economic growth, and, perhaps above all, individualism. Equality reinforces other ends that are more communal in nature, such as solidarity, mutual reliance, self-sacrifice, and civic spirit. These baskets of “goods,” centered around conceptions of the good life that result from primary allegiance to either liberty or equality, co-exist in considerable tension, even to the point that two prominent schools of thought have now coalesced in defense of their respective virtues.
Liberalism—which takes its name in honor of its allegiance to liberty—in its various forms has tended to place a priority on human autonomy and the necessary requirements of liberty that accompany the flourishing of each individual in all of his or her uniqueness. Liberalism takes its historical bearings in particular from the political philosophy of John Locke, who, along with Hobbes and Rousseau, argued that human beings are creatures that are born naturally free in a state of nature and only assent to the rule of government due to the better pro- tections it affords. Law represents a constraint on some freedoms, but not on those most essential ones that make us free individuals: life, liberty, and property (in Locke’s formulation)—the last of which Jefferson modified to “the pursuit of happiness.” Through the invocation of rights, all individuals preserve protections against the encroachments of government and reserve the right to revert back to a “state of nature,” if the predations of government begin to outweigh the conveniences it affords. This classic conception of liberalism affords a justification of limited government and ultimate individual sovereignty.
Communitarianism, which arose in the latter part of the twentieth century as a response to perceived excesses of liberalism, has tended to stress those shared features of civic life that are necessary for both individual and communal flourishing, and which are given short shrift in liberalism’s individualistic philosophy. Formulated in works by, among others, Robert Bellah and Amitai Etzioni, communitarianism has argued for attentiveness to the realm of the civic sphere, whether manifested through associations, religious activities, active participation in political life, or the physical organization of public space. Such activities are assumed to be necessary features of public life even in a liberal philosophy, but according to communitarians, they are implicitly undermined by liberalism’s stress on individualism, whether political, social, or economic. Beyond the formal equality afforded politically by liberalism’s belief in equality before law, or its economic embrace of equal opportunity, communitarianism has insisted on the importance of forms of “civic equality” that result from the actual encounter with and interaction among fellow citizens and that produce a greater willingness to honor mutual obligations that are seen as a necessary accompaniment to liberal rights.2Mickey Kaus recommends this communitarian form of “civic equality” over “money equality” of the kind portrayed in “Harrison Bergeron” in The End of Equality (New York: Basic, 1992) esp. chs. 3 and 5. See also Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995); and Robert B. Reich, “Secession of the Successful,” The New York Times Magazine (20 Jan. 1991): 16.
Deriving respectively from countervailing devotions to liberty and equality respectively, the battle lines between liberalism and communitarianism are clearly drawn, and, for each, the health of the democratic polity and its citizenry depends mightily on the relative ascendance of liberty or equality.
Tocqueville: The Conforming Individualist?
The permanent adversity between liberty and equality was famously noted in Alexis de Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century masterpiece Democracy in America, recently called by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.”3Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, introduction, Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000) xvii. Tocqueville alerted his audience, both in his more aristocratic France and in democratized America, to the profound tension between these twin values of democratic society, elaborated the concomitant goods and potential excesses that would accompany each, and rightly predicted they would be forever locked in combat, even if they must be mutually supported and admired by citizens of a democratic regime.
It has been often observed that Tocqueville has the unique feature of appealing equally to both contemporary “communitarian” and “liberal” thinkers, manifested in his embrace by the Left (qua communitarians) who find his egalitarian and communal sympathies, as well as his con- demnations of the excesses of market capitalism, most compelling, and by the Right (qua libertarian liberals) who tend to find Tocqueville’s defense of liberty and suspicion of an encroaching State irreproachable. As Mansfield and Winthrop note in their introduction, “it is quite striking that both the Left and the Right appeal to Democracy in America for support of their contrary policies.”4Mansfield and Winthrop, introduction, xviii. Mansfield and Winthrop have elaborated on this observation in “What Tocqueville Says to Liberals and Conservatives Today,” Perspectives on Political Science 30 (2001): 203-5. Reviewers of their translation also noted this feature of Tocqueville, prompted in part by alarm at the conser- vative reputation, in particular, of Harvey C. Mansfield, and fearful that Tocqueville was being cast as, in the words of Caleb Crain, a “Neocon.” See Caleb Crain, “Tocqueville for the Neocons: A New Translation of the French Philosopher that the Political Right Can Embrace,” The New York Times Book Review (14 Jan. 2001): 11. See also similar observations by Gordon S. Wood, “Tocqueville’s Lesson,” The New York Review of Books (17 May 2001): 46–9. In particular, they continue,
On the Left he is the philosopher of community and civic engagement who warns against the appearance of an industrial aristocracy and against the bourgeois or commercial passion for material well-being: in sum, he is for democratic citizenship. On the Right he is quoted for his strictures on “Big Government” and his liking for decentralized administration, as well as for celebrating individual energy and opposing egalitarian excess: he is a balanced liberal, defending both freedom and moderation.55xMansfield and Winthrop, introduction, xxiv.
They note the American penchant for quoting Tocqueville—including allusions by every President, Democrat and Republican, since Dwight Eisenhower.66xMansfield and Winthrop, introduction, xviii. In the ancient controversy between equality and liberty, and between “community” and individualism, he seems to be a friend of partisans of each, even at the risk of appearing convoluted or internally inconsistent.
Or so it would seem, if one were to base one’s views on those who selectively quote Tocqueville. However, since his work comprises an encompassing assessment of democracy, the presumption of an underlying consistency in Democracy in America throws suspicion on any easy division between a “Left” and “Right” Tocqueville. Indeed, a serious and sustained encounter with Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy and of America forces one not only to reject this superficial version of Tocqueville, but further, to reconsider the apparently accurate portrait with which this essay began, namely the evident division between equality and liberty.77xIt should go without saying that Mansfield and Winthrop, having aptly portrayed these partisan invocations of Tocqueville, also warn against such simplification of his text: introduction, xviii. For, while Tocqueville—and any casual observer of America—discerns a profound and ineliminable tension between the two, Tocqueville does not stop his analysis there. For Tocqueville, this division is a practical consequence of a deeper congruence and profound intimacy between the two. If most observers tend to notice only the clashes between the old couple in the arena of public affairs, Tocqueville goes deeper to discover the root cause of their marriage in the first instance.
How can we account for the fact that Tocqueville seems to describe Americans as at once singularly conformist—under the sway of the tyranny of the majority—and defiantly individualistic? Proponents of communitarian equality, fearing above all vicious individualism, and advocates of liberal individualism, fearing above all an unquestioning conformity, each maintain that such a simultaneous condition described by Tocqueville is impossible. Yet, he claims at once that “I do not know of any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America,”88xTocqueville 244. and that it is “the American way of taking the rule of their judgment only from themselves....”99xTocqueville 404. Tocqueville’s American appears to be a creature that partisans of equality and liberty would deem to be impossible: a conforming individualist, or an individualistic conformist. How can this be?
Tocqueville describes a complex social and psychological portrait of democratic man that easily escapes the cursory reader of his vast tome. The dynamic he describes leading to this apparently contradictory state of the democratic soul arises above all from one fundamental feature of democracy to which he returns over and over: “the equality of conditions.” Here he means not any literal equality of the kind described by Vonnegut in “Harrison Bergeron”; rather, he describes a form of equality that derives from the fact that Americans place little or no significance on any apparent or actual distinctions between human beings. They are not daunted by wealth or cowed by intellect; they pay no homage to the morally virtuous and easily overlook the deficiencies of the vicious. It resembles to a great extent the democratic polity described by Socrates in the Republic, namely “a sweet regime, without rulers and many-colored, dispensing a certain equality to equals and unequals alike.”1010xPlato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic, 1968) 558c. Americans see one another as “semblables,” according to Tocqueville, that is, people just like oneself. As put by Mansfield and Winthrop, “The democrat considers others to be like himself, and if they are truly different, he sees them to be like himself regardless. He ignores or flattens out any differences that might call equality into question.”1111xMansfield and Winthrop, introduction, xlvii. 1
The “equality of conditions” is a fundamental and necessary feature of democracy, and Tocqueville often admires the openness and vitality that this form of equality affords Americans, in opposition to the stultifying hierarchies that result from aristocratic assumptions of inequality. Characteristically, however, Tocqueville notes that a regime’s core feature has a tendency, over time, of becoming excessive in the absence of countervailing correctives and thereby generates dangerous counter- proclivities and undermines admirable dispositions and practices. Part of the brilliance, and difficulty, of Tocqueville’s analysis is his recognition that, left to its own devices, the core virtue of any regime—including, and perhaps especially, democracy—gives rise to vices that threaten to undermine that virtue and lead to, if not the regime’s demise, then to a vicious parody of itself. In opposition to much of the history of political thought, Tocqueville rejected as a “chimera” the supposition that regimes could be mixed in any true sense, and argued instead that “in each society one discovers in the end one principle of action that dominates all the others.”1212xTocqueville 240.
The “equality of conditions” is expressed in its purest form in political democracy, that is, by means of a system in which every person’s vote counts the same and expresses equally legitimate beliefs and interests as any other person’s vote. Tocqueville famously diagnosed, however, that this form of political equality, once practiced on a mass scale, would result in a new phenomenon: “tyranny of the majority.” This haunting phrase gives rise to images of crowds physically threatening a small minority or a lone dissenter, and in one footnote he gives several examples from America of active majoritarian repression.1313xTocqueville 241–2, n. 4. Yet Tocqueville’s main insight into the phenomenon of “tyranny of the majority” is not that it would appear most often in such an overtly repressive manner, but rather that, over time, it would become an internalized form of psychological control, a pure anticipation of disapproval from a perceived majority, and would manifest itself through the attempt to avoid veering from perceived majoritarian opinion. In a notable passage, he suggests that in certain important respects, people living under despotic tyrannies were more free than modern democratic man:
Under the absolute government of one alone, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us.... When you approach those like you, they shall flee you as being impure; and those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you, for one would flee them in their turn. Go in peace, I leave you your life, but I leave it to you worse than death.1414xTocqueville 244–5.
A consequence of equality, resulting in the “dogma of the sovereignty of the people,”1515xTocqueville 53. is that “the people”—a faceless, nameless mass—becomes the final arbiter of what is deemed right and “acceptable.” This fact does not, in itself, extract internal assent from one who differs from the majority; however, it forces each individual to realize that he has no distinct or “unequal” claim by which to reject the convictions of the major- ity, thus recommending a hesitancy, even silence, before the perceived majority for fear of obloquy and ostracism. While democracy has its inception in Christian teachings of the inherent dignity of each human,1616xTocqueville 11. the ironic result of democracy’s fruition is a felt sense of lost dignity in practice, if not in theory. Since dignity cannot be secured in the public realm where one’s voice is imperceptible and where the risk of social disapprobation is too high, the democratic citizen turns avidly to the private sphere, a place where each person matters. Outward conformity is the price paid for an inward sense of private significance. This silent dignity, pursued wholly in private, gives rise to a condition for which Tocqueville was forced to invent a new word: “individualism.”
Individualism, according to Tocqueville, is a reflective and peaceful sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and his friends, so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.1717xTocqueville 482.
In response to perceptions of his personal weakness, democratic man retreats further from the public sphere that might otherwise sustain his sense of individual strength. While people in democracies are individually weak amid a large and faceless majority, they sense a potency when left to themselves and a small private circle: “They are in the habit of always considering themselves in isolation, and they willingly fancy that their whole destiny is in their hands.”1818xTocqueville 484. This perceived potency, born of withdrawal from conditions that otherwise confirm each person’s individual weakness, in fact leaves every individual weaker than before, as each has no influence on public affairs, and each person’s voice—made more singular in the absence of a wider circle of associates—is altogether drowned out. The response, ironically, is not to seek out fellowship that would strengthen the individual, but to retreat further from the perceived indignity of public life: democracy “constantly leads him back toward himself alone and threatens finally to confine him wholly in the solitude of his own heart.”1919xTocqueville 484.
Tocqueville thus describes a vicious circle of which the democratic man is increasingly unaware: with each perception of indignity, democratic man withdraws further into the private sphere where he finds a sense of significance that is, in fact, belied by the actual loss of influence in the wider world. The apparent confidence of democratic man—located in an individual who is gradually more solitary and isolated—in fact masks a condition of increasing individual enervation. The dynamic resulting from “equality of conditions” gives democratic man both a sense of overweening self-confidence and isolated insignificance. Both these conditions, almost paradoxically, exist simultaneously, expressed both by the stated unwillingness to judge, or be judged by, one’s equals, and by an outward disposition toward conformity. This belief in excessive and deficient personal significance—held at the same time—suggests that democratic man is a wholly new creature. While Aristotle describes an extreme as either an excess or deficiency of a particular quality,20Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York: Macmillan, 1962) 1108b11–1109b14, esp. 1108b27–8 (“the extremes are more opposed to one another than each is to the median…”). by contrast, democratic man at the same time exhibits both an excess and a deficiency of felt personal significance, and thus exists simultaneously at two extremes. Whereas according to Aristotle one could correct an excess or deficiency by “drawing away [from the extreme] in the opposite direction,”2121xAristotle 1109b4–5. democratic man must be charged with moving simultaneously in opposite directions—both by restraining his overconfidence and overcoming his sense of enervation—thereby attaining an equilibrium that resembles a version of the virtuous Aristotelian mean. However, with the full fruition of democracy, he lacks increasingly the resources for doing either, no less both.
This paradoxical condition has the result of rendering democratic man especially susceptible to hard blows of fate, since each individual is connected only by an increasingly thin web of relations to other individuals who are likely to be equally affected by the same burdens. This isolation leaves him with almost nowhere to turn for assistance:
As in centuries of equality no one is obliged to lend his force to those like him and no one has the right to expect great support from those like him, each is at once independent and weak. These two states, which must neither be viewed separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracies very contrary instincts. His independence fills him with confidence and pride among his equals, and his debility makes him feel, from time to time, the need of the outside help that he cannot expect from any of them, since they are all impotent and cold.2222xTocqueville 644, emphasis mine.
The consequence of this combined condition of independent pride and weakness is, in times of trouble, to cause democratic man to turn to the one source of assistance in a position to respond to him and countless others like him—the State. With the assent of a mass of isolated, weak, and besieged individuals, a new form of tyranny is born: democratic despotism. As Tocqueville describes democratic despotism,
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild.... [It] does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.2323xTocqueville 663.
Thus, in a comprehensive and subtle analysis, Tocqueville describes an intimate connection between equality (admired by the communitarian Left) and individualism (extolled by the libertarian Right), and a firm and inseparable relationship between individualism and the soft despotism of the centralized bureaucratic state. Such a confluence goes unperceived by the libertarian Right, which views individualism and Statist soft despotism as mutually exclusive, a false oppostion that is in fact implicitly accepted even by many contemporary opponents of libertarianism. Tocqueville, alternatively, explodes contemporary assumptions that typically divide the Left and Right, demonstrating instead the complex interrelationship between “equality of conditions” and individualism, between egalitarianism and liberty, between freedom and soft despotism. What today’s narrow-minded partisans can’t help but put asunder, Tocqueville helps us to put back together. It is a marriage, however, with fearful progeny—in both senses of “fearful”—who are at once in need of courage and humility.
Lonesome No More!: Government as the Solution to the Problem of Individualism
Partisans of the libertarian Right like especially to cite the preceding passage in which Tocqueville, in a certain uncanny anticipation of Nietzsche, condemns the soft, herdlike existence of the mass of democratic citizens unconsciously restrained by a benevolent democratic despotism. Yet, unaware or unwilling to confront Tocqueville’s explanation of the origins of this new despotism, they willfully ignore the sentences that precede that same passage:
I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.2424xTocqueville 663.
To recommend individualism as the cure for the rise of the centralized state—as have countless libertarians from William Graham Sumner to Ronald Reagan and beyond—is, by Tocqueville’s lights, to propose the equivalent of throwing refined oil on a raging bonfire. What is needed is to cure people simultaneously of their dual sense of personal weakness and individual potency, most famously, according to Tocqueville, by means of associations and religion. Yet, in embracing especially the former recommendation, the communitarian Left often overlooks the further prescription in Tocqueville’s analysis: neither of these can stand to correct democracy’s dangerous excesses on their own, but in the time of democracy’s full culmination, require the active assistance of, even outright creation by, government.
According to Tocqueville’s diagnosis, associations offer a singular antidote to the condition of “simultaneous extremes” exhibited by democratic man, at once lending strength in the face of perceived public indignities and chastening the belief in individual omnicompetence. On the one hand, associations provide the support and reinforcement in public life that might be easily lost in the face of the “tyranny of the majority,” allowing dissenters to find one another and then, through mutual organization, give voice against the majority.2525xTocqueville 183. On the other hand, participation in associations, leading inevitably to an encounter with differing perspectives even within a group formed around some shared vision, leads to a chastening of one’s own personal pride and a willingness to see matters from another’s perspective. Thus, in associations, “sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.”2626xTocqueville 491
Nevertheless, in the face of the dynamics of democratic “equality of conditions,” Tocqueville is not altogether sanguine about the health and longevity of associational life that he witnessed during his visit. This sense of fragility comes out most clearly in his discussion of the rise of individualism and fears of withdrawal from the public sphere, but even in discussing associations, he notes that it needs external support, especially as the dynamics of “equality of conditions” lead to the decline of public life: “In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases.”2727xTocqueville 492. It is necessary that the “arts of association” be created “artificially” in an age of individualism.2828xTocqueville 491. As in the case of religion—which comes equally under threat in democratic times—its corrective resources can only be supported by active intervention of government: “Governments must apply themselves to giving back to men this taste for the future which is no longer inspired by religion and the social state....”2929xTocqueville 524. The ability to see beyond one’s immediate narrow self interest—formerly the role played by asso- ciations and religion—can only be supported in a democratic age by means of active support and assistance of government.
Of course, the devil is in the details, and Tocqueville gives us precious few of those. In recent years, there have been many admirable proposals offered in the spirit of Tocqueville’s diagnosis aimed at addressing the pathologies of individualism in America, ranging from recommendations for a universal draft, to civil service requirements, to various strategies of strengthening communities and local institutions.30All of the above proposals are to be found in Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality. See also Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown, 1993); and Benjamin R. Barber, A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). Some have been so detailed as to suggest that we ought to attend to the status of local bowling leagues.31Of course, the locus classicus is Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (Jan. 1995): 65-78; and his recent book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). All of these, notably, call for an active role of government not devoted to creating a form of encompassing social and material equality feared by libertarians, but rather aimed at strengthening forms of civic equality—the kind afforded by the “arts of association”—that might be expected to have the effect of lessening the potential for the form of democratic despotism that Tocqueville described and the liberal Right fears.
My favorite proposal, however—and the one that I believe most ably captures the spirit of Tocqueville’s analysis—is one, maybe barely serious or perhaps deadly earnest, suggested by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1976 novel Slapstick: or, Lonesome No More!,3232xKurt Vonnegut, Slapstick: or, Lonesome No More! (New York: Dell, 1976). a novel that should be read by any libertarian admirer of “Harrison Bergeron.” In Slapstick a Presidential candidate runs on the slogan “Lonesome No More!” and argues that “all the damaging excesses of Americans in the past were motivated by loneliness rather than a fondness for sin.”3333xVonnegut, Slapstick, 160. Elected with an overwhelming mandate to solve the problem of American loneliness, President Swain arrives at this ingenious plan: every American is to be randomly assigned one of several thousand words—such as “daffodil” or “peanut” or “uranium”—which will become his or her new middle name. Accompanying this new name is a directory containing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every American who has been randomly assigned this new middle name as well, forming what Vonnegut has dubbed a “granfalloon,” or “meaningless association.” Presto: everyone suddenly has an extended family of 10,000 brothers and sisters. One may end up really loving or despising any of one’s new “relatives,” just as one does with members of one’s “real” family, which is in truth also a group of randomly born relatives (notably, Slapstick was written under the working title “The Relatives”). The main ambition of the plan is that every citizen will have the excuse to initiate contact with his or her new relatives, to begin to relearn the “arts of association.” The President discovers that one of his new “brothers” is the White House dishwasher and begins speaking to him for the first time. Over time, the various “families” begin to take on particular characteristics. One in particular—the Daffodils—are renowned for taking care of each other. They develop a motto: “once a Daffodil, always a Daffodil.”
Vonnegut’s notion of creating “extended families” to solve the problem of individual isolation diagnosed by Tocqueville, and by extension to lessen the need and demand for “democratic despotism,” alerts us to what is missing in America’s democratic philosophy. Left on their own, liberty and equality are apt to create too much loneliness. As Tocqueville and Vonnegut would remind us, we need fraternity as well.