Improving Tocqueville

If we had no existing institutions or traditions we could, like Plato, think of building some sort of aristocracy of merit. But Tocqueville thought that the “conservative function renovates old values with improved faiths.” I believe the conservative function mirrors evolution in the same way human beings retained the reptilian and mammalian brain even as they evolved the neo-cortex atop them.

We have inherited a democratic republic in need of renovation and improved faith, tearing it all down in radical revolution is destruction not change. Democracy only works well locally and we can get back to local democracy. We can also improve localism with the homogeneity of forming ethnostates, which can be built upon the constitutional separation of powers and states; that will put us in harmony with real kin-and-ethnic-centered human nature.

Tocqueville thought that “materialism” could ruin America, but I would rather disparage the wild "consumerism" of America and not make “materialism” a bad word. In considering change and democracy Tocqueville said that God or Providence paved the way for change in the world. I could agree with that if we were talking about material evolution, because it is material evolution that leads toward supermaterial Godhood, and for that reason I don't disparage theological materialism.