Once you’ve read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, it’s hard not to read everything that happens in America through anything other than a Tocquevillian lens. Sure, he got some things wrong (such as the quality of American literature), but mostly he got things right.

A few posts back, I talked about how right he was in his notion of the “tyranny of the majority.” In expressing his fear that in democracies the majority would oppress the minority — not so much by legislative power, but more by exerting an invisible, insidious intimidation that would inexorably end up silencing the minority — Tocqueville understood us better than we understand ourselves.

In the current presidential campaign, since voters mostly fall into two evenly divided, intensely hostile camps, they are best thought of as “two majorities.” Neither wants anything to do with the other (not even listening to what the other says), and each looks upon the other with contempt.

While political scientists grapple with how much of this derives from the culture wars, how much from a shift in demographics, how much from economic forces, or even how much of it is really a new phenomenon at all, reading Tocqueville prompts thoughts about large and grand forces of history that cut across not just decades, but centuries: To wit, a reading of Tocqueville suggests that to understand what’s going on in America today, we need to remember the underlying American commitment to, and passion for, equality.

According to Tocqueville, our love of equality is so great that it exceeds our love for just about everything else, including our proclaimed love of freedom (which, he argues, is more a “taste” than a passion).

Our passion for equality, he thought, would eventually strangle the possibility for genuinely new ideas to emerge. Why? Because the flipside of the American-style love of equality is our suspicion of all forms of authority — including intellectual authority. Rather than defer to authority, Americans like to turn inward to form their opinions. Descartes, Tocqueville says, almost as an aside, is the “unread, unacknowledged philosopher of the Americans.”

Although he wrote over a century and a half ago, Tocqueville already saw that American democracy had a distinctly anti-intellectual bent. Not caring much for ideas, we Americans like to rely on ourselves — what we today refer to as our “inner gut feelings” — as the final arbiter, even in matters about which we can’t possibly know anything. Tocqueville describes this as a situation in which “every man’s feelings are turned toward himself.”

Consider these observations in terms of last night’s debate between the presidential candidates. Flawed as the forum was, and limited by political constraints though the candidates might have been, the debate incontrovertibly exposed them to be holding very different ideas.

Voters, “expert commentators,” and spinmeisters, on the other hand, weren’t paying all that much attention to those ideas. Instead, as soon as the candidates left their podiums, everyone busily started thrashing one another with their opinions about who’d won, who’d slipped (and when), who’d hesitated at the wrong moment, who’d gotten in the biggest punches, who looked the best, or who looked the more presidential.

Ideas? If they were there (and inevitably some will argue there were none), we’ll never know. They flitted silently and rapidly away, lost in the black hole of opinion.