Democracy in America: INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON THE FAMILY 11- 4 -2010

 This chapter, INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON THE FAMILY, brought much to the mind of this former lawyer.

Too many child custody fights, too many debates over Indiana's child custody laws, left me wondering how many parents truly think about their role as parents. My parents divorced in 1964 and they worked very hard not to put us children in the way of their lingering resentment. They also put their children before themselves. But many men still think themselves still to be the familial master.

In a democratic family the father exercises no other power than that which is granted to the affection and the experience of age; his orders would perhaps be disobeyed, but his advice is for the most part authoritative. Though he is not hedged in with ceremonial respect, his sons at least accost him with confidence; they have no settled form of addressing him, but they speak to him constantly and are ready to consult him every day. The master and the constituted ruler have vanished; the father remains.

Think about that and think about why people want to be master and ruler of their children. If we teach a democratic people that they are to be ruled and mastered by a select few, do the people remain democratic?

Does this passage mark an error or a change?

...But as soon as the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day; master of his thoughts, he is soon master of his conduct. In America there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence: at the close of boyhood the man appears and begins to trace out his own path.

If viewing this as the teenager joining the workforce, does capitalism enlarge adolescence? 

[Typing this up, another thought came to me, one I am surprised I did not write about in 2010: that the current idea of family and adolescence did change after World War Two. I think Leave It To Beaver would have been incomprehensible to Americans before 1945, just as Angels With Dirty Faces would have been more alien to Americans the further we got from 1945. sch 8/13/2023.]

De Tocqueville concludes with this:

Democracy, which destroys or obscures almost all the old conventional rules of society and which prevents men from readily assenting to new ones, entirely effaces most of the feelings to which these conventional rules have given rise; but it only modifies some others, and frequently imparts to them a degree of energy and sweetness unknown before. Perhaps it is not impossible to condense into a single proposition the whole purport of this chapter, and of several others that preceded it. Democracy loosens social ties, but tightens natural ones; it brings kindred more closely together, while it throws citizens more apart.

But of capitalism's effect on the family? Does economics explain our looser family ties? 

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