When I was college, my government professor said that Alexis de Touqueville’s Democracy in America was the best political book because it was about the best governing system and it was about the most important democracy.  That’s true, and de Touqueville is still just as relevant as the day his book about our democracy was published.  The fact that the professor had just written a new translation may have swayed him, too.

In the same vein was  David Brooks’s column on Ted Kennedy.  Studying America, David Brooks writes:

We in this country have a distinct sort of society. We Americans work longer hours than any other people on earth. We switch jobs much more frequently than Western Europeans or the Japanese. We have high marriage rates and high divorce rates. We move more, volunteer more and murder each other more.

Out of this dynamic but sometimes merciless culture, a distinct style of American capitalism has emerged. The American economy is flexible and productive. America’s G.D.P. per capita is nearly 50 percent higher than France’s. But the American system is also unforgiving. It produces its share of insecurity and misery.

This culture, this spirit, this system is not perfect, but it is our own. American voters welcome politicians who propose reforms that smooth the rough edges of the system. They do not welcome politicians and proposals that seek to contradict it.

I see this every day.  In no other country does capitalism play such a central and vital role and there are advantages and disadvantages to that.  But it is the reality that we live in, and the reality that we choose.  David Brooks leaves it unwritten, but it’s not hard to see that this attitude, whatever the political persuasion of people in power or the president’s approval ratings, will ensure that the current government-interventionist wave will break and recede.