Tocqueville for our times

I have blogged several times on the dangers posed by widening inequality, business concentration, and political capture. The most recent being this revisit of Marx and Smith. 

In this context, The Economist has an essay which invokes the teachings of Alexis de Tocqueville to draw attention to the threat to liberty faced by today's democracies.

the threat to liberty today does not stem just from big government. It also comes from big companies, particularly tech firms that trade in information, and from the nexus between the two. Gargantuan tech companies enjoy market shares unknown since the Gilded Age. They are intertwined with the government through lobbying and the revolving door that has government officials working for them when they leave office. By providing so much information “free” they are throttling media outfits that invest in gathering the news that informs citizens. By using algorithms based on previous preferences they provide people with information that suits their prejudices—right-wing rage for the right and left-wing rage for the left.

Tocqueville cautioned that liberty and democracy do not necessarily go together. He argued that the latter could exist without the former in case power is centralised and central governments become extremely powerful at the cost of citizens and local governments. His nightmare,

power centralised in the hands of the state; citizens reduced to atoms; a collective willingness to sacrifice liberty for a comfortable life.

Unfortunately, this reality may be on us much more than we realise. Modern state is very powerful. Once power becomes centralised, and it is coupled with extreme concentration of economic power and wealth, it is only a short step for money to capture of the processes and institutions that makes the rules of the game. In fact, not a day passes with some story or other of such political capture - the latest being Amazon inserting itself as the exclusive procurement platform for office supplies by 1500 public agencies in the US.

And the collective of liberals, assured of comfortable material life, are happy to keep themselves busy opinionating and pursuing their interests in the small space left, and let the trend of elite capture march untrammelled. At least for the time being. Didn't someone say, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"?