Reading Democracy in America: How Democracy Affects the Relations of Masters and Servants, 11-1/2010

 Here we have a chapter of Democracy in America I think has no current application. Who has servants these days?

We have fast food restaurants instead of cooks, and Merry Maids instead of housekeepers. Remember Hazel? (Or Shirley Booth? Something else to make me feel old. I do not think the show even gets re-runs today. Is it on DVD?) The last show I recall having servants was Beacon Hill; a failed attempt at Americanizing Upstairs, Downstairs. 

The screwball comedies had plenty of servants – see My Man Godfrey. The upper middle class had a maid/cook in movies. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn had a maid in Adam's Rib, and they had one in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner – the last time I can recall anyone close to the middle class having domestic help.

So I am thinking servants in America came to an end some time in the Fifties. But have we all gained the mentality needed for service?

In this predicament the servant ultimately detaches his notion of interest from his own person; he deserts himself as it were, or rather he transports himself into the character of his master and thus assumes an imaginary personality. He complacently invests himself with the wealth of those who command him, he shares their fame, exalts himself by their rank, and feeds his mind with borrowed greatness, to which he attaches more importance than those who fully and really possess it. There is something touching and at the same time ridiculous in this strange confusion of two different states of being. These passions of masters, when they pass into the souls of menials, assume the natural dimensions of the place they occupy; they are contracted and lowered. What was pride in the former becomes puerile vanity and paltry ostentation in the latter. The servants of a great man are commonly most punctilious as to the marks of respect due to him, and they attach more importance to his slightest privileges than he does himself. In France a few of these old servants of the aristocracy are still to be met with here and there, they have survived their race, which will soon disappear with them altogether. 

When people of education look to the President as their leader instead of the country's Chief executive, I think that person has come under this kind of thinking. Which shows a fundamental shift in our politics from the democratic to something potentially undemocratic.

This is how de Tocqueville closes this chapter:

...The lines that divide authority from op- pression, liberty from license, and right from might are to their eyes so jumbled together and confused that no one knows exactly what he is or what he may be or what he ought to be. Such a condition is not democracy, but revolution.

That might does not make right reminds me of T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, and of Dick Cheney. I do not see our former vice president as seeing might as right. Rush Limbaugh talking about American exceptionalism really means America as a bully, which is another way of saying might makes right. Reading White gives a different perspective on might as right.

Reading the Gospels also gives a different perspective on might as right.