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Ok this my gut reaction on the first read through. Look this guy might be a legend in his own mind but a prominent thinker he is not. He is trying to rewrite history by attacking Alexis De Tocqueville as being a aristocrat that only talked to other aristocrats while he visited America. As if being privileged some how that kept him from connecting with the common man. It's like the Ann Richards comment that tried to portray Bush as not in touch with the common man when he was running for Governor of Texas. "Poor George he can't help it. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth." From April 1831 to February 1832 De Tocqueville took and extensive tour of the what was the then the US and parts of Canada all the while meeting a lot of people. His second paragraph pretty much shoots his own argument down. That some how all these historians and scholars came to the same conclusions as De Tocqueville is not a mistake.

I will re-read this thing but the guy's thesis is lame. The bottom line is that he wants to say is America suck back then and all these other people conspired to go along with it. Sure we had slavery at that time but we had huge war to overturn it so the Constitution would apply to everyone. Yes we were slow at correcting mistakes but our fore fathers had a vision that lead the way in insuring liberty for all. There was no way that it was going to change over night. But compared to other countries that have been around for a longer periods of time we did change over night. Our form of governmental society in less than 200 years has leveled mountains while other societies have languish in stagnation for thousands of years or have disappeared all together. This is why we are the strongest super power in the world today is because we stuck to the founding father's vision that was based on Judeo-Christian beliefs set froth in the Constitution and The Bill of Rights and through a huge sacrifice of life for these ideals we were able to implement it.

Take the time to read the De Tocqueville's book and I would also recommend Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People" and "Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties". Hope this is helpful.