Considering what the Tocqueville effect is and how it applies to today’s society

In the year 1840, when the U.S. was not even a century old, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the historical “Democracy in America,” the detailed observations of a nation just starting to break on through its initial growing pains. By then, the experiment that was the U.S. had been around long enough for both its citizens and outsiders from Europe to take note of how things were going. If the life of America, thus far was a college course, “Democracy in America” would be the country’s gradebook after a rough midterm week. A point where one thinks, “Alright, how are we doing here?”

Tocqueville delicately painted an impressively detailed picture of life in the new country, analyzing both the day-to-day happenings of the common man, as well as some much broader, socioeconomic observations. One phenomenon of particular interest has been tagged The Tocqueville Effect (despite poor Alexis having nothing to do with the actual effect), an observation that has proven time and time again to be a truism in developing countries.

In short, the Tocqueville Effect is the idea that social frustrations grow more rapidly as societal conditions get better. Or, put another way by Wikipedia, “after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.”

Think of it like a version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but for growing nations. Once the people stop having to worry about bloody revolutions, witch hunts, the guillotine and famines, they can then turn their attention toward the more minute details of society, and often get ticked off because of it. To paraphrase Tocqueville, when all conditions are unequal, nobody really cares about inequality because there is so much other stuff to fret over. But when the country starts to become more uniform socially, with less stark inequality among citizens, people grow more critical of and offended by any inequality at all.

What results is a repeating loop of decreasing inequality, followed by an increase in social frustration, and so on, until it seems that the people are just always mad at something. Tocqueville observed this phenomenon all across Europe — most notably with the bloodbath that was the French Revolution — but the effect can be clearly seen in the relatively short history of the U.S. With all of the social and political strife occurring today, I cannot help but wonder if we are all just powerless guinea pigs within old Tocqueville’s scarily predictable phenomenon.

Like any ongoing phenomenon, one must wonder how (or if) it ends. Is there a solution (or even positive end) to the Tocqueville Effect? Will our society become so scrutinized over and corrected that there will eventually be no inequality, and thus nothing left to complain about? Is a pure and completely uniform society even possible? Or is it just man’s unintentional nature to put some before others?

If the Tocqueville Effect really is the way of the world, then I am very curious as to how long it can go before something drastic happens. Are divisive elections, riots and social conflict the only end? They can’t be. Does the democratic machine eventually just implode on itself? Or is the effect simply explaining the effects of privilege when applied to a society as a whole?

How does the majority act when they are all equal? It makes sense that they would then focus on the few that are still not fully equal socially, but eventually there will be nobody left. And what happens then?

I can speculate until the sun sets, but what good is such fruitless speculation? It appears that Tocqueville’s observations and phenomena are indeed accurate and still active today. I suppose the only thing to do is to sit back on this hamster wheel of democracy and see how it goes. This should be interesting.

Andrew Hall is a UF management junior. His column appears on Fridays.