Customer Reviews

American Democrat and Other Political Writings

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Whereas, Alexis de Tocqueville offers his perspective on America as an outside observer, the literary genius James Fenimore Cooper offers his assessment of culture, politics and society in 19th century America. He doesn't hold democracy to be sacrosanct like we do today, but rather like any other system of government with its advantages and disadvantages. His look at the nature of liberty and its relation with equality is particularly intriguing.

He is cognizant of the dangers posed to American self-government, which values legal equality. Equality, is a virtue, only insofar as it pertains to equal rights and equality before the law. Any effort at establishing equality of outcome is tantamount to tyranny and opposed to liberty. Cooper illustrates the precarious relationship between liberty and equality. Unless, tradition, custom, the rule of law and the Constitution are revered and upheld- the American Polity could easily collapse into majoritarian tyranny under a demagogue.

One gains an appreciation of the system of government established by the American founding fathers after reading this book... They established a constitutionally-limited federal republic, with limits not only on the power of government, but with limits placed on the power of majority rule, so as to limit the fundamental role of government to protecting the rights of its citizens. This constitutional republic sought to balance out monarchial, democratic, and aristocratic elements...

This is a review only of The American Democrat. I read a different edition, but can't find it here.

I read The American Democrat mostly because I had just read an excellent book on the long-dead American Whig Party--which, in James Fenimore Cooper's time, was one of the two major political parties in America and the Democrat Party's chief opponent--and hoped that The American Democrat would prove similarly helpful in explaining the 19th-century Democrats.

I was wrong. The fact that "Democrat" is capitalized in the title prevented me from realizing that Cooper meant "democrat," not "Democrat," and by "democrat," he meant nothing more than a supporter of democracy. The book has nothing at all to say about any specific party, and only occasionally discusses political parties in general (negatively).

The American Democrat is two things: an attempt to explain the American political system as it was originally designed, with comparisons of representative democracy to monarchy, aristocracy and mob rule (which, at the time of the book's writing, American democracy was degenerating into); and a relatively scattershot collection of Cooper's observations on American society at that point. I understand that the book was meant to be a primer on American democracy.

The first half of the book, being the analysis of democracy in America, is interesting but unnecessarily long-winded and somewhat boring at times; Cooper does not write with great focus or succinctness, at least in this book. If the book was indeed meant as a primer, the first half does sound like one.

The second half, being Cooper's critique of Americans and the shortcomings of how they practice(d) democracy, is far more interesting; it alone is why you should want to own the book. American democracy was degenerating into mob rule (exactly what the Founding Fathers feared), with insufficient regard for the virtue and wisdom necessary to make democracy successful, and with demagogues manipulating the passions of the common man in order to gain power and prestige. (Cooper does not name any names.)

The edition of The American Democrat that I read--and this edition, according to other reviewers, contains two introductions, one by H.L. Mencken. Mencken's introduction is arguably as valuable as the book itself and is written more succinctly to boot. Mencken bluntly and cynically makes some of the same points Fenimore makes, as well as offering some thoughts of his own, such as the haunting "The Civil War blew the Old Republic to pieces."