This is Part V in a series on Tocqueville’s idea of the “township” in his classic work Democracy in America. Here are Parts I, II, III, and IV, if you’d like to read them.
As we consider local townships and home rule, you might be wondering: what about the flaws and vices of local associations and townships? Why doesn’t Tocqueville talk more about those in Democracy in America?
To praise the original inhabitants of Plymouth, as Tocqueville does at the beginning of Volume 1, may suggest that we are refusing to acknowledge the Wampanoag communities they stole from, or the role the Pilgrims’ grandchildren played in killing and enslaving Indigenous peoples during King Philip’s War. Brown University research has suggested that “between 1492 and 1900, an estimated 2 million to 5.5 million Indigenous people were summarily taken from their ancestral homelands and forced into slavery.”[1]
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