He's the best political thinker there is.
Here he is, on INDIVIDUALISM, rightly understood:
According to Alexis de Tocquevile (who is--I hope you've figured out--an authority for me on just about everything), the vice of modern democracy is INDIVIDUALISM. He doesn't mean of course the "rugged individualism" or John Wayne or even the entrepreneurial individualism praised by our Randian libertarians. He means apathetic withdrawal into a small circle of friends and family, a withdrawal based on the mistaken judgment that, in general, love and hate are more trouble than their worth. Individualism is a kind of "heart disease" that turns active citizens into passive dependents, a disease that can morph democratic self-government into a kind of despotism.
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