Prometheus 6   

On the confusion of motion and progress

From The NY Times: From Pitchforks to Proposition 13

But in California more democracy has produced not more attacks on the wealthy and big business but chronic chaos and even paralysis -- a kind of political catatonia perversely sanctified by neoconservative and libertarian dogmas that assert, as another former governor of California put it, that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." (Shays may have agreed with the second clause of that sentence, but certainly not with the first; he wanted to use the government to protect debtors and the disadvantaged.)

To the extent that Californians -- and Americans -- subscribe to that view, they have confounded the predictions of countless theorists about the nature of democratic politics. Among those theorists, Alexis de Tocqueville is an exception, for he identified the peculiarities of the American case now so vividly manifest in California, that most American of states. The characteristic social class that American society nurtured, said Tocqueville, was composed of "eager and apprehensive men of small property." Though born in revolution, their country was unlikely ever again to undergo revolutionary upheaval. "They love change, but they dread revolutions," Tocqueville concluded, because "they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one."