Tocqueville's "Soft Tyranny"

Here's an illuminating exposition of Tocqueville's famous phrase "soft tyranny" which just happens to call to mind the "tyranny of relativism" prominently present in the latter-day writings of Pp. Benedict.

...Some have identified Tocqueville’s “mild despotism” with the welfare state. But I think that is to misunderstand the great Frenchman’s intention. Prudent public provision for the poor, or for those who are old and infirm, or a public system of social insurance to compensate for the vagaries of life, is not necessarily “the road to serfdom.” Instead, Tocqueville has something more radical and dangerous in mind. In the name of a more “humane” society, in the name of respect for every human being and every lifestyle (as we say today), democratic man may lose sight of the moral distinctions and the human qualities that allow freedom to flourish. He may identify virtue with softness and lose any sense of the primordial distinction between good and evil. He may come to see the state as a great instrument to flatten distinctions, to equalize all, to bring dignity to the exploited and oppressed (an infinitely flexible category in modern times). Freedom becomes identified with moral relativism and with an indiscriminate egalitarianism. The state becomes the great instrument of social engineering, of a project to create a new man purged of old prejudices (you will have heard resonances of twentieth-century totalitarianism). We have arrived at Tocqueville’s future; his nightmare (cauchemar) is increasingly our reality. To put it succinctly: democracy is at risk of becoming a tyrannical project. How are we to save the democratic project, and a true conception of human liberty and dignity that ought to accompany it?...

Read the rest.  It's that good.

(HT PowerLine)