Chasing the Red, White, and Blue: A Journey in Tocqueville's Footsteps Through Contemporary America

Cohen's journey takes him from New York City, through the Rust Belt (specifically Flint, Michigan), the greater Ohio valley, the Deep South, and Washington, D.C., with a side trip to Silicon Valley. Mixing interviews, personal observation, and statistical data, he finds that de Tocqueville's trenchant, generally buoyant opinions of the young republic (based in part on misunderstood assumptions) no longer hold true. The gap between rich and poor is rapidly widening; race and religion have become divisive social factors; lobbyists wield disproportionate influence in government; and for an increasing number of citizens the dream of upward mobility has become an "almost willfully stupid denial of reality."

Cohen covers much ground here very rapidly. His statistics come in flurries. His observations, while ardent, tend toward the obvious; his mini-histories are blurry and conflated, and many of his encounters with various citizens, from stockbrokers to migrant workers, perfunctory. It is not that his conclusions, pessimistic for the most part, are invalid, necessarily, but the evidence upon which he builds his case can seem too often too meager to support them. --H. O'Billovitch

Product Description
In 1831, a young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville made a journey to America. At the end of the 20th century, David Cohen made that same journey, with one new destinationthe frontier of Silicon Valley. This is his account: a funny, troubling, and thought-provoking inquiry into the lives of Americans today.

Cohen diverts from Tocqueville's original journey only by adding California, the new frontier and command center of the information age.
What struck Tocqueville most, back in 1831, was the "equality of conditions" among the Americans then. This, and "self-interest, properly understood" were Tocqueville's greatest impressions and formed the basis of his praise of the American way of life.

Cohen is an expert on Tocqueville and is well-versed in the great man's journals. As he makes his way across America he interviews a diverse sampling (in my opinion, a well sought-out cross-section of the have's and the have-not's) and compares these findings against the fulcrum of equality Tocqueville described.
What does Cohen find?
An ever-widening gap between the have's and the have-nots!
Things have changed. He finds that Tocqueville's work is full of unqualified conclusions and summary statements that do not possibly reflect the general populace of America in the last half century. Beyond being out dated and inaccurate when applied to modern times, it's questionable whether it was even all that accurate at the time it was originally written. By marginalizing his findings on blacks and Indians, Tocqueville trivialized them. By failing to qualify his conclusions he helped to perpetuate an idealized view of America that he never saw.
Tocqueville's findings are further skewed (says Cohen) because the people he interviewed were not a balanced group. Not an unbiased cross-section of "Americans" at the time. They were always successful, professional elite (privileged aristocrats of the time) always male, and always white.
Cohen wants to avoid a similar mistake this time around... and I applaud his riding of buses, to find the pulse of the common man/woman. Every indication seems to point toward a widening gap between the rich and the poor in America, and the author tells the story in an engaging, (humorous where appropriate) way. There is a section where he sends fictitious e-mails to Tocqueville and I just loved this section. The whole book is a gem, and no part lags.
By the way, it is just as NOT anti-American as it is NOT pro-Anything Else... it is just disturbingly truthful. Amazingly, in spite of the facts, it shows that the American spirit is alive and well... as I mentioned above, there is unquestioned disparity, but not despair-ity!
But perhaps the prevailing message of this book can be expressed by the guy right there in Chapter One, the chapter on New York. There was most assuredly a time when any American would have said that a million bucks would be enough to quit working forever. This guy in New York though, he says "Twenty million and I'll walk."
Twenty million!
That's how far we've progressed along the "wealth" continuum... some people honestly feel that they will need twenty million before they quit chasing the red, white and blue!
All aboard!


Tocqueville update   February 5, 2002
liknaitzky david (Cape Town)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

Could Tocqueville have forseen what America would be like a hundred and fifty odd years down the line? In a well thought out and painstaking endeavour, David Cohen has literally followed the trail taken by Tocqueville, almost lived the part, and has documented his findings in an exceedingly engaging, objective, and lively fashion. Filled with interviews with local people, perceptive insights into the American way of life as it is today, compared to what Tocqueville found and documented, this book is a delight to read. For those of us, especially non Americans, who have not read Tocqueville himself, this will be an interesting insightful introduction to aspects of early American life together with a factual and rather wry view as to where the capitalist and democratic way has in fact led. And it is not always very pretty. Do the fine developments of the past century and a half outweigh many of the rather dreadful aspects of American life David Cohen has found and so perceptively documented ? Is this what the American dream envisaged? Or is this the decline of the west that we are experiencing?? Well, this is distinctly required reading, so read all about it.