“America is no longer a political model”

A profound change is taking place before our eyes without the majority of our fellow citizens being well aware of it yet. Many continue to see America as a reference and, undeniably, Uncle Sam’s homeland remains, as in the past, a privileged testing ground for understanding the evolution of our democracies. But, from now on, the world’s leading power no longer offers, as in the time of Tocqueville, a model. On the contrary, it is now necessary to analyze it in order to grasp the spring of the excesses of our societies struggling with insurmountable inequalities and irreconcilable ideologies. The danger is no longer the totalitarianism of our eternal specialists in rearguard fighting. It now lies in what the author of the Democracy in America was already calling the drifts of “democratic passions”.

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It is these threats that the historian Ran Halévi, close to François Furet, publisher at Gallimard and columnist at Figaro, in this little essay devoted…