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The 19th century French political thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that in America, motivation almost universally came from self-interest understood in a new way, rather than from virtue, which was often the case in European aristocracies. writes that the COVID-19 pandemic has seen deviations from this tendency, with a rise in both brute selfish and virtuous behavior. He attributes this mutation of American “self-interest rightly understood” to the decay of democracy, and the rise of white supremacy and anti-democratic sentiments.
The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville chose America for his great study of democracy for two reasons. He thought that the origins of the United States made America the site most amenable to understanding democracy its inherent tendencies, flaws and promises. America was a kind of natural experiment because one could have some confidence that one could see the trajectory of democracy itself, free from confoundi