Theda Skocpol The Tocqueville Problem Civic Engagement in American Democracy Over the past 15 years, my scholarship has been devoted to understand- ing the patterns, the possibilities, and the impossibilities of politics and social policy in the United States. In this essay, therefore, I have decided to use historical evidence to address current public and scholarly debates about civic engagement in American democracy. As I hope to remind us all, social science historians can speak clearly to contemporary public concerns. We may be able to introduce some better evidence and more sophisticated explanations into ongoing debates. Social Science History 21:4 (winter 1997). Copyright © 1997 by the Social Science History Association456 Social Science History President Bill Clinton talks about serving as “a bridge to the twenty- first century,” yet it is striking how many pundits are looking for a bridge to the past (along with Bob Dole, Clinton’s Republican opponent in 1996). Nostalgia is remarkably rampant among public commentators today, as they search for some critical juncture in the nation’s history when citizens were civically engaged in healthy ways, when U.S. democracy was flourishing more than it seems to be now. Analysts hope to draw inspiration and lessons for what might be done today to revive our apparently ailing democratic and civic life. When Was the Golden Age? Of course different golden ages are being invoked and explored —often de- pending on the partisan sentiments of those who are looking backward. Although few publicly prominent Americans will admit to being “liberals” anymore, those who do own up to this tendency usually locate the golden era of U.S. democracy in the 1930s and 1940s. Supposedly this is when Presi- dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt provided bold progressive leadership—and when, as Steven Fraser recently told the New York Times, labor unions “represented not just an interest group, but a social movement whose ac- tivities promised much to not only its immediate members, but to the whole society” (Greenhouse 1996). From this perspective, the trouble with Ameri- can democracy today is that Bill Clinton is wis at an organizational nadir. Hope for the future lies in the current reorienta- tion of the AFL-CIO toward organizing drives and the forging of broader washy, while unions are alliances with intellectuals and religious leaders. But nonliberals correctly point out that American civic engagement en- compasses much more than organized labor and goes back historically long before the New Deal. Unions have been only one of the ways—and not the major way at that—through which large numbers of Americans have orga- nized themselves in civil society. The reluctance of many on the Left to look beyond the organized working class—or its absence —helps explain why the current debate about civic engagement is dominated by people of conser- vative or center-right political proclivities. Yet as we are about to see, such nonliberals can have blind spots of their own. Characteristically, nonliberals look at America’s past not throughCivie Engagement in American Democracy 457 Marxist-colored glasses but through the eyes of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured the fledgling United States in the 1830s, gathering observations and ideas that were in due course published in Democ- racy in America (1969 [1835—40]). Tocqueville’s opus has become one of the modern world’s most influential political ethnographies: It is a set of densely descriptive observations by a foreigner that were written for the purpose of influencing political debates in the author’s own country. Quite obvi- ously, Alexis de Tocqueville was doing political ethnography in Democracy in America. Alarmed by the simultaneous expansion of democracy and an ever-more-centralized bureaucratic administrative state in postrevolutionary France, Tocqueville used explorations of early Republican America to make the case to his own countrymen that they should encourage voluntary asso- ciations as a new buffer against state centralization. Voluntary associations, Tocqueville argued, could serve as a democratic substitute for the purported socially protective role of aristocrats under the Old Regime. “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations,” Tocqueville (1969 [1835-40]: 513) reported in a famous, oft-quoted passage. This happy situation was possible, he felt, because extralocal government seemed barely present. “Nothing strikes a European traveler in the United States more,” wrote Tocqueville (ibid.: 72), “than the absence of what we would call government or administration. There is nothing centralized or hierarchic in the constitution of American administrative power.” Above the level of thousands of local governments, the early United States seemed to Alexis de Tocqueville to be held together not by any state worthy of the name but by religious sentiments, commerce, egalitarian customs, freely associating citizens, and general laws enforced by lawyers and courts. Given Tocqueville’s antistatist. purposes for writing Democracy in America, it is not surprising that over a century and a half later, contempo- rary critics of the U.S. federal government celebrate the great Frenchman’s stress on voluntary associations, understood in opposition to bureaucratic state power. Still, today’s admirers of Tocqueville disagree about exactly when in America’s past the voluntarist wonders of old flourished in the ways most relevant to the present. Civic-minded conservatives in and around the post-Ronald Reagan Re- publican Party yearn for the actual early nineteenth century (see Joyce and