“A completely democratic government is so dangerous an instrument that, even in America, men have been obliged to take a host of precautions against [its] errors and passions,” wrote the great French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in his diary, as he toured America between 1831 and 1832.
Among the precautions Americans had taken, Tocqueville continues, were “the establishment of two chambers, the governor’s veto, and above all the establishment of judges.”
The earliest and perhaps still the greatest analyser and critic of American democracy, Tocqueville is the man who coined the phrase “the tyranny of the majority.” Looking at recent events in his native France, he was only too aware what could happen when the errors and passions of the common man, who far outweighed the aristocracy in number, were allowed to get out of hand and run wild.
Like Machiavelli, Tocqueville was a firm believer in the necessity of aristocracy, of the need for it to balance democratic excess. But unlike Machiavelli, who was writing three hundred years earlier, in Renaissance Florence, Tocqueville was forced to accept the decline and eventual disappearance of aristocracy as a social class.
Without an hereditary elite to preserve and enforce aristocratic values, something else would be needed to keep democracy in check. When Tocqueville looked at the nascent American republic, barely fifty years old, he saw that role fulfilled by the legal profession. Although judges and lawyers belonged to the people and shared common birth with them, nevertheless, by habits and tastes they were a class apart, an aristocracy, with interests that might align, but didn’t fully overlap, with those of the mass of people. Legal professionals are “like the natural link between the two things, like the chain that unites them,” Tocqueville says.
While the common man is notoriously fickle, easily manipulated and driven by emotion, often without a clear sense of his own interests, the judge and lawyer together represent order, form, hierarchy, respect and, perhaps most of all, obedience to principle. They are the ones most empowered to act in the interest of the common good, even when they are out of step with majority opinion.
Judges and lawyers, as an institutional aristocracy, have special powers, and chief among them, Tocqueville says, “hidden at the bottom of the soul of the American lawyers,” are not just the tastes and habits of aristocrats, but “a great repugnance to the actions of the multitude, and a secret contempt of the government of the people.” Méprisent secrètement are the words Tocqueville uses for “secret contempt.”
A cultivated disgust and disdain for their fellow citizens serve the greater good.
In this respect, America’s judges and lawyers aren’t so different from Machiavelli’s prudenti, the secret ruling order of “prudent men” that operates from the shadows and manipulates both the masses and the aristocrats to serve the true needs of the republic. Tocqueville describes the judges and lawyers as a kind of clandestine political party that “extends over the whole community and penetrates into each of its classes.” Although this party doesn’t have a name or a program, nor a unified will, it guides society “in accordance with its desires,” acting upon it “incessantly and in secret.”
Forgive me the lesson in political philosophy. There is a point. I think it’s clear now that, if there is a dominant theme to the first nine months of the second Trump presidency, it’s that Tocqueville was right: The judiciary really does harbor a “secret contempt” for “the government of the people.” Only the contempt isn’t secret at all. It’s now completely out in the open, for all to see, and it’s monstrous in size.
Of course, there were plenty of judicial roadblocks during the first Trump administration—nationwide injunctions and unfavourable rulings at every level—but they were nothing compared to the degree of obstruction on display since Trump returned to power.
During a recent Supreme Court ruling that decided the validity of nationwide injunctions, Justice Amy Coney Barrett accused her benchmate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of wanting to encroach on the powers of the executive branch and enshrine an “imperial judiciary.” In her scathing opinion, Justice Barrett wrote as if that new ruling power had not yet been established. In truth, far from being a democracy, America is now a magistracy—a society run by judges for their own ends.
No aspect of the Trump agenda, from cutting government waste and USAID money for feminist dance classes in Azerbaijan to preventing the mutilation of children and anti-white hiring policies, has escaped the meddling of activist judges, most of them Obama- or Biden-appointees.
But no single issue better exemplifies the judicial plan to subvert the second Trump presidency and the will of the American people than deportation; and no single case better than that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the so-called “Maryland Man” who was deported to El Salvador and then brought back to the US at a judge’s order.
More than half a year after Garcia was first picked up by immigration enforcement, his case still rolls on. Yesterday, the DoJ announced Garcia would soon be heading to Liberia. Previously it was Eswatini—formerly Swaziland—Uganda and various other Third World countries before that.
The Garcia case should be cut and dry: He’s an illegal immigrant who entered the US multiple times illegally, was almost certainly a people trafficker (earning as much as $100k a year), is undoubtedly a member of MS-13 (it’s tattooed on his hand)—oh yes, and he’s also probably a pedophile too, although the child-sex charges have been dropped against him.
Be in no doubt: Kilmar Garcia is the model. The activist judges, America’s new rulers, want every single illegal in the US to go through the same absurd back-and-forth, the same will-he-won’t-he wrangling as the Maryland Man, for months or even years on end. Forever. It’s a deliberate tactic to run down the clock; to sap the Trump administration of its power and voters of their confidence in the man who promised the largest mass deportation operation in American history.
Four years will pass, and millions of illegal aliens who should have been deported will still be in America.
Even if Kilmar Garcia is deported as planned before his scheduled hearing at the beginning of next month, the judges aren’t going to stop. It’s time for the Trump administration, and the American people, to meet contempt with contempt. The judges have lost all sense of who and what they serve. Remind them.
There’s a reason why America is not a democracy. We are a constitutional republic.
Our founding fathers, learned from history that all democracies fail because they turned into mobs: The threat of a majority.
Trump should do what Nayib Bukele did in El Salvador and invoke a state of emergency.