Higher Learning.

• Author: Lynch, Michael W.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

In which our man in Washington foregoes dirty talk for Tocqueville and finally learns what a wigwam is.

Subj: Tocqueville vs. S&M

Date: 3/27/01

From: mwLynch@reason.com

"Is it a matter of pride to you at Yale that one of your own has become president, and with so much loyal help from all of you?" Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield asked the audience in a quarter-full auditorium. He'd come to the question period of his lecture on Alexis de Tocqueville and had just claimed that the electorate in a democracy plays a divine role, rewarding the virtuous in this life the way God does in the afterlife.

Considering it's an Ivy League university, Yale, where my wife teaches English and I spend half the month living in a dorm, has a surprisingly active intellectual climate. On a single day a few weeks back, I was able to catch Spike Lee attack the film biz and hear young fogey Jedediah Purdy discourse on the importance of being way too earnest.

When Mansfield came to town, I was forced to choose between his lecture, which he delivered in tandem with his wife, Delba Winthrop, and a presentation titled "Bondage, Domination, and S&M 101: What BDSM Has to Offer Even the Most Vanilla Couples." REASON Publisher Mike Alissi, who lives nearby in Connecticut, was in town, which may explain why I picked Tocqueville talk over dirty talk.

Mansfield and Winthrop have recently completed the third-ever English translation of Democracy in America. "Most thinking people are either liberals or conservatives," said Winthrop, while Mike barely restrained himself from shouting out something about libertarians. "Most independents," she continued, "apart from standing apart from parties, pick unthinkingly from each of them, having their cake and eating it too.

Mansfield informed the audience that we need a really good translation of the book to understand the nuances of Tocqueville's profound, yet sometimes obscure, thought. He may be right: Tocqueville's big book gets quoted more than the Bible and only a little less than Seinfeld.

The famously conservative Mansfield last made the press when he claimed that Harvard's grade inflation was the product of its active recruitment of blacks rather than a response to uppity, upper-class white kids insisting on A's. His missus, it turns out, is no slouch in the controversial quip category either: "American men are too busy to have great romances," she said in a sweeping style worthy of Tocqueville. Mansfield stood next...