[maire]

You have to put Tocqueville in the context of his era.

Europe was still in the era of monarchies. In fact, even though France had just beheaded their monarchs they tried to recreate various flavors of monarchies for decades. They even installed an "emperor" in Mexico.

Tocqueville was trying to figure out if other forms of governance could exist.

I find it comforting that the same flaws we see in democracy today also existed in the time of Tocqueville. That does not mean that I think other forms of government are better. I agree with Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

[dang]

Can you please stop it with the ideological flamewar? I'm bending over backwards not to ban you, and you keep posting things that are not the curious conversation we're looking for.

If you want to have curious conversation, you're welcome here, along with all of your opinions and views. If you just want to smite enemies, please go do that somewhere else.

We don't need you to tow any ideological line (trust me, we really couldn't care less, besides which I'm all in favor of having well-read communists in the conversation) but we do need you to stop it with the generic flamewar tangents. They're predictable and uninteresting.

Also, you've been crossing into personal attack regularly and that sucks and is not ok. It's also beneath you, or at least I would have thought so.

It would be helpful if you would take to heart that we want HN to be a web forum where people don't make habits of such things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[prepend]

Marx and Engels weren’t writing on American slavery and race relations.

But they seem pretty racist to me based on their frequent dropping of n-bombs in their writings [0].

I think the reason we don’t have 19th century racist essays by Marx and Engels is that they wrote almost always about Europeans and European culture.

Agree on Churchill. But does that surprise anyone? England was still literally colonizing India and South Africa during Churchhill’s time. It would be weird to find a non-racist world leader from that time period. Even LBJ, decades later, held pretty racist beliefs even while passing the civil rights act.

[0] https://medium.com/@robertpannier/karl-marx-friedrich-engels...

[maire]

I love the change of subject. ;-)