Alexis de Tocqueville (19th-century French diplomat, political philosopher, and historian) foresaw that a society focused solely on its well-being would allow a tutelary power to weave its net. Europe is paying the price today and Venezuela, where oil revenues bought years of silence before the collapse, shows what the cost is.
In 1979, 62% of European voters went to the polls in the European Parliament elections; but in 2014, only 42%. Between those two elections, an entire generation withdrew from public life, convinced that nothing could change and preferring the comfort of their private lives to the confrontations of politics. This is exactly the moment Tocqueville anticipated, as early as 1840, as a gateway to a new form of power, more difficult to combat because it does not provoke any visible resistance.
Soft despotism thrives on individualism
Tocqueville distinguished individualism from selfishness because the modern democratic citizen does not hate his fellow men, he forgets them, and withdraws into the narrow circle of his family and friends, leaving the community to its fate. In that void, a tutelary power settles in, he wrote, a power that does not break wills, but softens them, and that gradually covers society with a net of meticulous and uniform rules, almost impossible to pierce.
In Europe, that net was woven during the decades of growth and European construction, among expanded administrations, rewritten school programs, targeted associative subsidies… The victory of progressivism, with threads patiently knotted while a prosperous and calm population (also on the right) saw no reason to oppose, as long as the bill did not arrive.
In just a few decades, values have evolved under the influence of progressives. These values have gradually been incorporated and have become the norm, permanently transforming our Western societies, without any real resistance occurring.
The few political parties that opposed these significant social changes (from mass immigration to social aid or the massive use of debt) have gradually resigned themselves and accepted them. Thus, the so-called “conservative parties” in Europe have a much more liberal discourse, while the programs of the last century are considered reactionary today.
