How a Frenchman’s book on ‘Democracy in America’ nearly 200 years ago explains the midterms, from data centers to Texas
From an economic perspective, being anti-data center is like being pro-recession, I assumed, but Tocqueville’s Democracy in America explains a lot of what has really gone on in America for centuries.
Key points
- I personally thought as much for months about the issue of data centers — a massively overstated environmental risk but a massively understated political and emotional issue — until voters proved they were not messing around.
- ‘Popular authority’ Look closer, Tocqueville wrote, and nearly every faction of American political life comes down to one side trying “to limit,” and the other “to extend, the popular authority.” Five years later, in his second volume, he explained what made Americans different from the Europeans watching them.
- I had been privately skeptical, because data centers are the bedrock of the massive industrial boom powering most of America’s GDP growth.
The Library of America calls it arguably “the most perceptive and influential book ever written about American politics and society.” One big idea he offered was what he called the “ general equality of condition ” among Americans, meaning how widely property and status were spread around.
Additional details
- Tocqueville was a young French aristocrat who toured the United States in 1831 and published Democracy in America in two volumes, dated 1835 and 1840.
- Texas holds one-fifth of the planned data-center pipeline, and its governor-elect has promised to ban new approvals until the state legislature acts.
- “The great advantage of the Americans is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so.” Two centuries on, that birthright came out on Nov.
- Down the ballot, voters in 10 states decided 41 local measures on data centers, and in 40 of the 41 they favored limits on development.
- The data-center industry made its plans without accounting for any of that, and it’s an open question whether the Democrats who just won a landslide really understand it, themselves.
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