James Bryce, the English historian and statesman,
arrived in America for an extended tour in the mid-
dle of the 1880s, at a time not unlike our own. It was
the height of the Gilded Age, and the country was
grappling with inequalities of wealth, rising lev-
els of immigration, rapid economic transition and
questions about the United States’ role in the world.
An astute chronicler—he was a practicing politi-
cian, a venerable professor of civil law at Oxford,
and would later serve as the British ambassador to
the U.S.—Bryce published his reflections in a two-
volume work, The American Commonwealth.
Among his insights was a warning of the dangers
of a renegade President. To Bryce, the real threat to
the Constitution came as much from the people as
from the White House. Disaster would strike Ameri-
can democracy, Bryce believed, at the hands of a dem-
agogic President with an enthusiastic public base. “A
bold President who knew himself to be supported by
a majority in the country, might be tempted to over-
ride the law,” Bryce wrote. “He might be a tyrant, not
against the masses, but with the masses.”
Now, at the end of the second decade of the
21st century, Bryce’s prophecy has come true.
This is not hyperbole. The rise of Donald Trump,
and the reflexive resilience of his public support,
has produced a singular American moment. The
start of public impeachment hearings in Con-
gress on Nov. 13 marks the beginning of a test for
the country. As the debate over impeachment andNearly half a
century after Alexis
de Tocqueville’s
classic Democracy
in America, another
European observer
crossed the Atlantic
to assess the state
of the American
experiment.
Nation