In 1831, the French writer and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across the new American republic in search of answers about democracy. Nearly two centuries later, The Economist executive editor John Prideaux set out on his own version of Tocqueville’s journey for a new podcast series — and came away reassured that the country’s capacity for self-renewal remains surprisingly intact.
“It’s hard to have a settled view about America, and maybe it’s actually unhelpful,” Prideaux told me in an email about Tocqueville Road Trip, the new six-part podcast series from The Economist that marks 250 years since the founding of the U.S.
“Even the Founding Fathers suffered bouts of extreme pessimism. John Adams wrote that ‘Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.’ A road trip is a good antidote to that kind of thinking.”
Prideaux went on to tell me how, while the podcast was in production, Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. That same month, Prideaux himself visited New York’s Sing Sing prison — still standing nearly 200 years after Tocqueville visited it — and talked with men who’d been locked up for life. One of them started quoting Tocqueville, from memory, on the ability of America to heal itself.
Looking For Tocqueville’s America
Prideaux’s encounter at the prison was just one stop on a trek that follows Tocqueville’s route through a very different America.
Beginning in New York City, Prideaux’s reporting in Tocqueville Road Trip takes him everywhere from a sprawling data center under construction to Harvard University, a county jail holding ICE detainees, the corridors of power in the nation’s capital, and Palm Beach — the South Florida community that’s become synonymous with President Trump’s MAGA political movement.
Tocqueville famously observed that, while America’s political system looked chaotic and unruly on the surface, he saw a country that was more or less stable at its core. That America was actually more of an idea than a traditional country.
I asked Prideaux what he thinks might surprise Tocqueville the most about the U.S. today, and about how Americans relate to one another.
“He would have been surprised by how much America’s elite resembles an aristocracy,” Prideaux said. “He was a big admirer of the country’s inheritance laws, which broke up large fortunes before they could reach dynastic levels. And he would have been alarmed by how powerful the federal government is now.
“At one point in [Tocqueville’s book] Democracy in America, he writes that the president has almost royal prerogatives on paper, but doesn’t have the means to exercise them. He even wondered if federal power might fizzle altogether as states became more important. He didn’t get much wrong but, spoiler alert, this is not what happened.”
Tocqueville Road Trip is the sixth limited series created for The Economist’s podcast subscription offering, Economist Podcasts+. It’s part of a podcast slate that covers subjects ranging from China’s leader Xi Jinping to science, technology, online scams, and the future of Russia.
At one point in the first episode of Tocqueville Road Trip, Prideaux explains just how long Tocqueville’s most famous work has been part of his own relationship with America.
“That book has been my companion since I first started writing about this country for The Economist,” he says during the episode. “I began reading it on the plane over from London to Washington for my first assignment as a U.S. reporter in 2013.”
Over the decade that followed, Prideaux became one of the magazine’s most prominent interpreters of American politics and culture, writing and editing more than 100 cover stories about the country. He describes himself as “usually the person in the room advocating for optimism.”
But the turbulence of recent years left him questioning assumptions he’d long held about America’s future. The best way he could think of to deal with those doubts “was to go back to Tocqueville. To try to see this America through his eyes.”
And so he set out to test whether Tocqueville’s assessment about the country still holds. The podcast, he says, represented “a chance for me to take a moment for myself amidst the madness, to clarify what I really think about this land of prodigies, as Tocqueville put it.
“And to answer a pair of questions that have been on my mind as this country approaches its 250th birthday. How much of what Tocqueville admired about democracy in America still holds true today?”
