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A Catholic Mirror for the Empire
by Alejandro Bermudez 

A Catholic South American intellectual, speaking recently on the role the U.S. plays in the world, observed that every empire needs a mirror, and that a mirror can only be found in the peripheries of the empire, not in its center.

An empire without a mirror is like a person without one: You not only have no idea how others see you, but more importantly, you are unable to see yourself.

Without a mirror, Americans are prone to think that they are the world-wide “normal,” in the sense that they are the norm for the rest of the world.

A Saturday Night Live skit got it right. In a mock news cast, the “anchor” announced that the International Aviation Association had decided that English would be its official language, since “they have finally realized that all the other languages are too weird.”

Alexis de Tocqueville and his landmark “Democracy in America” have long been America’s mirror. His unrelentingly brilliant analysis of what he saw during his 1831, nine-month long trip across the states spared neither praise nor criticism.

Today, the United States’ confusing international role, especially since President Obama’s Nobel Peace prize, shows how urgently America needs another Tocqueville.

Some interesting efforts, such as Niall Ferguson’s “Colossus,” have been made, but they fall way short for the simple reason that real Tocquevilles are hard to find.

The best case for this was clearly – if unintentionally – made by the Atlantic Monthly in 2005, celebrating the bicentennial of Tocqueville’s birth.

The Atlantic’s editors thought that finding another Tocqueville required just hiring a smart Frenchman, in this case Bernard-Henri Lévy, to travel the country first class, talk to Americans and then tell them how they look.

As a Peruvian with Spanish citizenship, I can’t say how Lévy’s five-part series of articles in the Atlantic sounds to an average American. But what I can say is that if he would have been writing about Spain or Peru, he would have left town tarred and feathered.

In fact, Lévy makes no effort whatsoever to avoid the clichés of the typical French intellectual, who sees Americans as an ignorant, fat, gun-toting people who cling to religion and are incapable of electing a “true intellectual” and French-looking person, such as John Kerry, instead of a “cowboy.” (One note here: for French and German intellectuals, “cowboy” is the closest one can get to being insulting without actually swearing.)

Of course, sparing none of his patronizing tone, the French intellectual tries to be kind to the guys that paid for his trip, and concludes that, all in all, most Americans are likable, not that fat, gun-toting or religious; but still far away from the few Northeastern elites that are admirable because they are very similar to … well, French intellectuals.

In a worth-reading summary of Lévy’s portrait of America  published by “First Things” in 2006, David A. Westbrook explains that while Tocqueville “explored America as a way to learn what it meant to found a society on democratic principles,” Lévy’s account “has no unifying concept comparable to democracy. Instead of treating America in terms of an idea, we get lots of journalism, mostly descriptions of places or paraphrases of interviews.”

“On reflection,” Westbrook rightly points out, “one comes to understand that Lévy’s real topic is not America; Lévy’s topic is France’s imagination of America. More specifically, Lévy addresses the tendencies of French thought, including a fair dose of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and the like, that can be expressed in socially acceptable fashion as ‘anti-Americanism’.”

Summarizing the differences between Tocqueville and Lévy, Westbrook actually makes the point of how hard it is for America to find its much needed contemporary mirror. 

“Tocqueville went to America in 1831, when he was twenty-five. He spent nine months traveling and published ‘Democracy in America’ in two stages over the next nine years. Lévy has traveled through America in considerable comfort over the last year or so, and almost immediately began publishing his impressions. While Lévy had a driver named Tim and the lovely Anika for traveling companions, Tocqueville was accompanied by his friend Gustave de Beaumont. On their American journey, Tocqueville worked incessantly, while Beaumont often relaxed, sometimes playing a flute. Tocqueville was dead of tuberculosis at fifty-three. In contrast to Tocqueville but like Beaumont, Lévy is a conversationalist, a socialite, médiatique rather than aloof. Lévy is already fifty-six, appears to be in excellent health, and by all accounts leads a sunny life,” Westbrook writes.

Lévy’s failure to become the new Tocqueville is the most recent one, but not the first. In 1982, American journalist Richard Reeves re-traced Tocqueville’s travels and published his conclusions in “American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America” (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982.)

The problem with both Lévy and Reeves is that, much unlike Tocqueville, none of them got religion.

In fact, as Dr. Jerrold C. Rodesch pointed out in a 1986 essay, “For Tocqueville, a Roman Catholic, religion was not only a matter of truth but of sociological necessity. Humanity needed the constraints of a morality founded on the authority of transcendent faith. In America, where civil power was not grounded in religious authority and no clear structure of social privilege constrained individual choices, the development and persistence of vital religious institutions and belief would test the success of the American experiment.”

In “Democracy in America,” Tocqueville openly admits the enormous influence of a Catholic priest, Father James Ignatius Mullon, on his understanding of the American experiment, particularly on the separation of church and state.

It was a Catholic priest who enlightened his Catholic mind, to help him understand the complex relationship of American life to not only the then-small Catholic presence, but to Christianity in general.

No doubt, in these confusing days, America needs a new Tocqueville more than ever.

But after reading the most recent failed efforts, it seems clear that a new Tocqueville will not come without an understanding of religion – more specifically, a religion that is catholic … as in universal.

 

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