How Alexis de Tocqueville explains Democratic Party conformity

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It can be dizzying, for an outsider, to see the Democratic Party and its allied institutions walk in lockstep — promoting a fiction that Biden “passed the torch” voluntarily, suspending scrutiny of Harris’s policy positions, reveling in emotions and “vibes.”

But Tocqueville emphasized how democracy is not always amenable to a diversity of opinions: Instead, the majority’s pressure “acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.”

 
Tocqueville described small-d democratic deliberation like this: “As long as the majority is still undecided discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, a submissive silence is observed, and the friends, as well as the opponents, of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety.”
 
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