The thought of the U.S. fighting a Thirty Years War or engaging in something akin to the Peloponnesian War (which lasted 27 years) is unthinkable. These were wars fought by aristocrats, not democrats, who want chiefly to get on with their pleasurable lives. A miserably difficult war against a fanatical enemy with no conclusion in obvious sight has nothing to do with pleasure. A hard sell, this war, and Tocqueville would have bet the chateau against the American people finally buying it. For once it would be nice to see him proved hopelessly wrong. ~Joseph Epstein, OpinionJournal.com

When I first read Mr. Epstein’s article in the print edition, I thought it was one of those unconvincing, throwaway op-eds the WSJ occasionally commissions to appear intellectual and “serious.” (“Seriousness” is something the WSJ desperately values and completely misunderstands.) But it was worse than that–Mr. Epstein had very nearly made a more or less consistent argument (though not one with which I would agree) and then wrecked it right at the end. More on Tocqueville in a moment.

What was it he said at the end? The Peloponnesian War was fought by aristocrats and not by democrats? If we are speaking of high-status, wealthy elites forming the leadership of Athenian politics, this statement would be partly true, but it was assuredly those same ‘aristocrats’ who convinced the democratic mass to support the war and defend Athens’ arche and the democratic Assembly again that authorised the fateful, disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415-13. It was the “tyrant city” Athens, the democracy, whose hegemony provoked what we call by the cacophonous word of “blowback”–it was not as if the war was exactly thrust on some poor, unsuspecting, pacific polis. It was the premiere democrat, Perikles, who enunciated the superiority of democratic values that would–in his estimation–cause Athens to prevail in war. Though it suffered an oligarchic coup in 411 (and the oligarchs justified their seizure of power in terms of being able to better preserve Athenian hegemony and win the war), Athens’ military supremacy at sea was based on democratic manpower in the fleet.

Citing the Peloponnesian War was a uniquely bad choice to make his point. Athenian democracy failed that test of war, but it was because of the regime’s folly and its weaknesses in land warfare. There is nothing special in democracy that encourages a love of tranquility or peace–this is the hallmark of perhaps bourgeois liberalism or perhaps of an intellectual conservative agrarian if it is the mark of any such tendencies.

Democracy, for good and ill, inculcates a sense of common political identity with more or less unknown people who also lay claim to the mantle of citizen and encourages a sense of solidarity or, God help us, fraternity with fellow citizens. This sense of solidarity makes modern democracies surprisingly stalwart and vehement in war, provided that there is a real sense of grievance or a goal of national aggrandisement at stake, and furthermore makes them very resistant to the idea of negotiation or settlement. The idea of “unconditional surrender” was immoral and lunatic, but it was a very democratic idea and it was no contradiction that FDR was the one who employed it first as a full-blown policy.

“We” all more or less instinctively have identified with the people attacked on 9/11, even though they may have lived and worked in places completely foreign to our own experiences, and the more casualties “our” armed forces suffer in war the less likely “we” are to seek an end to war short of victory, provided that the war seems to have an intelligible purpose. Democracy is irrational, but it is not completely insane–even democrats must have more or less tangible goals for their wars that serve their interests. But note the very language Americans use about the army–an institution for which few if any Founders had any romantic illusions. Americans refer to soldiers as “our troops”: this underscores how deep the collectivist idea of fraternite has sunk into our consciousness. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn recognised this about us sixty years ago when he wrote Black Banners: in a conversation between a German aristocrat and an American airman (whose plane had been shot down), the airman reflexively retreated into the shell of “we” and “us,” while the aristocrat repeatedly insisted that he speak for himself.

Tocqueville was perceptive and wise about many things, but this was not one of them. He observed something true about Americans of that time, but perhaps attributed it to the wrong habits. The American’s democratic impulses have taken him in entirely different directions, and it has not been towards tranquility. It is also not an accident that mass enthusiasm for warfare at the turn of the 20th century through the start of the Great War came on the heels of the democratisation of politics in all major European countries–America experienced much the same to a smaller degree, but fortunately avoided as much colossal bloodletting by directing the jingo spirit against more manageable targets.

Tocqueville observed these things about democracy in the America of the 1830s, an America with an expansive continental frontier, a foreign policy of neutrality and nonintervention and basically peaceful commercial relations with all other nations. In its short run on the world stage, American democracy as such has hardly remained so peaceful or peace-loving. The restrained, pacific (as far as other nation-states were concerned) yeoman “democracy” of the Jacksonian Era was itself something of a transitional phenomenon between the less democratic state and ‘national’ politics of the early republican period and the beginning of American mass politics. As soon as the old bonds were sundered, American democracy (and the Democracy itself) was open to expansionism and war as the perceived need arose. The nearest approximation to total war in the 19th century (and the first virtually total war) was the war between the two most democratic polities on Earth, namely the War of Secession, and as in WWI it was the masses (and the demagogues of politics and the press) that both accelerated and prolonged the war.

Mr. Epstein has caught himself in a bit of a trap as the jingo in a “democratic” regime who nonetheless believes in the pacific virtues of democracy–perhaps the very fantasy that encourages hope in the purpose of the Iraq war discourages the jingo of the “resolve” of American democrats.