I think that Democracy in America by Dtoqueville is still the best description of what America is and and in many ways ought to be. Uh the the the Mansfield translation is is the best uh version of it. It's really terrific.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “We Are Going to Have to Live Here With Each Other” (https://nytimes.com/2025/09/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ben-shapiro.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
Um, well, first of all, I think uh Toqueville's Democracy in America would be a good place to start. not going into it thinking of it as the iconic text, but going into it thinking about it as someone who is an observer from the outside looking in uh and who has, you know, both uh admiration and reservations.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “The Very American Roots of Trumpism” (https://nytimes.com/2025/04/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-steven-hahn.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
American political scientist at Stanford; author of The End of History and the Last Man and The Origins of Political Order.
recommended
Democracy in America is important for the following reason: Tocqueville, in a way, was the first sociologist, though that field didn't exist in the 1830s, when he wrote the book. In it, he looks at the formal institutions of American democracy—Congress, and the presidency, and so forth—but what everybody really takes away from it is that those institutions ride on top of the morals and mores and habits of the underlying society.
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