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Tocqueville attributed the upheavals his family lived through to centralized government: “Most of those people in France who speak against centralization do not really wish to see it abolished; some because they hold power, others because they expect to hold it. It is with them as it was with the pretorians, who voluntarily suffered the tyranny of the emperor because each of them might one day become emperor. . . . Decentralization, like liberty, is a thing which leaders promise their people, but which they never give them. To get and to keep it the people might count on their own sole efforts: if they do not care to do so the evil is beyond remedy.”

Read more: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/alexis-de-tocqueville-how-people-gain-liberty-and-lose-it/#ixzz2IjaDJM4J

Tocqueville was the man who discovered American individualism—he described it somewhat negatively as “a mature and calm feeling which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures, and to draw apart with his family and friends.” Yet he talked approvingly about self-help, a hallmark of American individualism. For example: “The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it.”

With phenomenal foresight, Tocqueville predicted that the welfare state would become a curse. For example: “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

Sorry to cut and paste, however I find these passages most notable. The last paragraph in particular. I have seen a redefining of Democracy that has allowed this, here in America.