America has, throughout this past century, been the only Western democracy dominated exclusively by parties sympathetic to liberal capitalism. Socialist Party has never received more than 6 % of the vote in presidential elections and has never won more than a couple of seats in Congress. How is it, for instance, that Marx’s prediction that capitalism would inevitably lead to the rise of socialism has been so conclusively falsified in America? The U.S. As he had in 1831, he would want to bring back to Europe and to the rest of the world the lessons learned from, and the questions raised by, the American experience. But his fascination today would be less with America’s now well-established tradition of democracy than with capitalism. He forecast, for instance, that America, which was then a country of only 13 million people, would within a hundred years be one of two great powers in the world, the other being Russia. Were he to revisit America today, Tocqueville would be gratified to see how many of his insights and predictions have stood the test of time. He did the job and published a book on it, but what captured his interest, and made his name, was the wider subject of democracy-how it worked so well in America when it had failed to work in France or, indeed, anywhere else in Europe. He was just 26 years old and had been sent by the French government to examine the American prison system. Alexis de Tocqueville came to America from France in 1831.
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