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What Reeves does very well is throw important ideas, his own and Tocqueville's, into the air. Are American political leaders generally second-raters? So both Tocqueville and Reeves were assured, and so their eyes and ears told them. The French visitor worried about a tyranny of the majority, and the American sees crude sloganized opinions percolating up by means of incessant poll taking to control the nation's political discourse. Tocqueville brooded about the place of blacks in the society. Reeves, in his gloomiest moments, thinks that if violent repression ever does come to the U.S., it will be through hysterical efforts to control street crime. A general feeling among whites, he reports, is that "We've done enough for the bastards." A widespread belief among Detroit blacks, he learns, is that whites flooded the city's black slums with "skag"—cheap, low-grade heroin—as a deliberate pacification measure, cheaper and easier than giving machine guns to the police.
At times Tocqueville was so eerily prescient that he seemed to have had a private view of the future. His comment about critics of the Federal Government—"It was by promising to weaken it that one won the right to control it"—might have been written about the 1980 election. Reeves' observations have a cogency of their own. Discussing what he perceives as the modern tendency to appeal to government to solve all ills, including governmental ones, he writes that "government, trusted and feared, obeyed and avoided, revered and disdained, had become very much like a religion. Its role was to confront evil for the rest of us." Reeves' reporting and analysis compare well with Tocqueville's own, which is to say they are first-rate. His journey through a middle-aged nation that Tocqueville saw in its youth took him through uneven terrain somewhere between smugness and despair, among a population going fairly steadily about its business.
—By John Skow
Excerpt
"Tocqueville wrote, 'I do not think that the white and black races will ever be brought anywhere to live on a footing of equality. But 1 think that the matter will be still harder in the United States than anywhere else. It can happen that a man will rise above prejudices .. . but it is not possible for a whole people to rise, as it were, above itself'
I was not so sure about that... The golden time for black Americans—the 1970s—was not only the result of violence. It was also partly a result of the ability of black leaders—particularly Martin Luther King, Jr.—to force America's white majority to face up to and prove there was some truth in the American rhetoric."