The French Are in a Panic Over le Wokisme

For many of us who had come to exchange ideas, the venue felt significant. The château, with its ivy-covered walls and swan-filled pond, lies far away from the intricacies of multicultural life in modern democracies. But Tocqueville was, of course, one of the world’s keenest interpreters of the American experiment. His classic two-volume text, Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840, explored the paradoxical nature of a vibrant new multiethnic society, founded on the principles of liberty and equality but compromised from the start by African slave labor and the theft of Indigenous land. Its author, while finding much to admire, remained skeptical that such powerful divisions could ever be transcended, because unlike in Europe, social rank was written into the physical features of the nation’s inhabitants.