As we welcome a new year, political pundits will soon focus much of our attention on polls, campaign speeches, and television ads.
In 2026 North Carolina will elect a new US senator, help determine which party controls the US House, and decide whether state legislative leaders will have enough votes to overcome the governor’s vetoes.
Each is important to the state’s future.
Yet it’s also worthwhile to step back from current controversies. Refocusing on basic principles reminds us that ballot choices involve more than supporting or opposing the red and blue teams.
In recent weeks, this observer enjoyed revisiting the yellowed pages of a now 70-year-old paperback copy of Peter Viereck’s “Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill.” Writing when Winston Churchill was still an active player in British politics, Viereck had no knowledge in 1956 of the Reagan Revolution, the Tea Party movement, or other significant recent developments in conservative history.
Yet Viereck’s observations are far from outdated. One could devote multiple columns to useful insights within his 186-page volume.
The rest of today’s discussion focuses on one of Viereck’s subjects: the 19th-century French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville. “Some excellent authorities call him liberal; some, conservative,” Viereck reminds us. “Liberal was his open-minded approach and his criticism of Bourbon monarchy and the days before 1789,” the year of the French Revolution.
“Conservative was his warning that democratic conformity may stifle liberty and that equality and liberty are opposites, not synonyms,” Viereck argued. “His mind was totally independent. Its lonely truths upset liberal and conservative cliches equally. Today many readers find his insights more original and exciting than ever.”
“Today” meant 1956 to Viereck. Spend much time around fans of political liberty these days, and you’ll discover that Tocqueville remains a favorite subject.
After touring our still relatively new country roughly 200 years ago, Tocqueville “found more to praise than to blame in our democratic experiment,” Viereck wrote. “But by predicting with uncanny accuracy the nature of our future demagogues and thought-controllers, he warned America against the intolerance, the stifling conformity of mob pressure.”
“So doing, he took the characteristically conservative stand that equality threatens liberty: ‘Americans are so enamored of equality they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom,’” Viereck added. “But our severest critic was also our warmest friend: ‘The principal instrument of America is freedom; of Russia, slavery.’”
Long after his American trip, Tocqueville viewed revolution directly during the tumultuous year of 1848. His published recollections of that year “contained three assumptions fundamental to conservatism: protection of a traditional framework, rejection of majority dictatorship, and rejection of a priori blueprints of social utopia,” Viereck explained.
By “a priori blueprints,” Viereck means theoretical designs with no basis in actual human experience.
While supporting tradition, “Tocqueville recognized the inevitability of constant change,” Viereck wrote. “In contrast with liberal relativists, he urged a permanent framework of what he called ‘forms’: to canalize the inevitable change.”
“His writings were one long war against unhistorical and rootless thinking,” Viereck concluded.
As with most thinkers profiled in the book. Tocqueville tells part of the story himself.
“Men living in democratic ages do not readily comprehend the utility of forms,” Viereck quotes Tocqueville as writing in “Democracy in America.” Those “forms” are traditional institutions or practices.
Tocqueville critiques small-d democrats. “Forms excite their contempt and often their hatred; as they commonly aspire to none but easy and present gratifications, they rush onwards to the object of their desires, and the slightest delay exasperates them.”
“This same temper, carried with them into political life, renders them hostile to forms, which perpetually retard or arrest them in some of their projects,” Tocqueville continued. “Yet this objection which the men of democracies make to forms is the very thing which renders forms so useful to freedom; for their chief merit is to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak, the ruler and the people, to retard the one and give the other time to look about him.”
“Forms become more necessary in proportion as the government becomes more active and more powerful, while private persons are becoming more indolent and more feeble,” Tocqueville warned. “Thus democratic nations naturally stand more in need of forms than other nations, and they naturally respect them less.”
We see no shortage today of attacks on basic American institutions and forms. Restoring respect for those forms ought to occupy at least some of our attention as we look ahead to key political discussions and decisions in 2026.
Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.
