"Democracy loosens social ties, but tightens natural ones; it brings kindred more closely together, whilst it throws citizens more apart.
This was probably true of 18th and early 19th century rural America, though I suspect it wasn't so much political democracy as the middle class way of life that brought families closer together. With the rise of cities, automobiles, electric lighting, movies, television and social security things have changed radically, pulling families further apart.
The tumultuous and constantly harrassed life which equality makes men lead, not only distracts them from the passions of love, by denying them time to indulge it, but it diverts them from it by another more secret but more certain road.
D.H. Lawrence said as much almost a century later. He'd have argued that our present affluence and leisure haven't made things any better.
Adolescent rebellion of the sort you describe probably wasn't present so much in the early days of the Republic. Young people started work early and that's what their energy went into. But if we view a democratic society as one where inherited status doesn't prevail, and everyone has to create his own identity, you can see these adolescent rebellions as part of that process. The funny thing is, that youth rebellion is a mass phenomenon above all else -- also a consumerist phenomenon -- but it's something people go through on the way to an identity that they call their own, individual and unique. And there's even a certain crazy logic in that. There's a democratic mixture of longings for belonging and distinction behind the generational differences that people relish. Woodstock Nation or Lolapalooza Country is a way to banish disconnectedness and older class distinctions by creating new mass generational groups.
Here's a subtoquevillian article by Roger Ebert's sidekick Snobbery Flourishes at All Levels of Society on a familiar theme.
Someday, I'll read Tocqueville. With all that's changed in the world, so many of his opinions still hold water.
You correctly pointed to the dissasociations of modern life, how "With the rise of cities, automobiles, electric lighting, movies, television and social security things have changed radically, pulling families further apart."
I think this is exactly de T's point: "natural ties" are strengthened in a democracy, be it the nuclear family, similar-thinking fools on the internet, or idiots at the Lolapalooza, as you say. Perhaps "natural ties" leads us astray; sperm associations aside, instant communication allows idiots of similar stripes to pose in instant, similar idiocy.
Always love your commentary, so please say.