At the end of his seminal work, “Democracy in America,” Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville offered a stunningly prescient “prophecy” of how democratic institutions could easily fall into a tyranny unlike anything the world had ever seen before. Nearly two centuries later, his “prophecy” seems to draw closer and closer to fulfillment every day, if it hasn’t been fulfilled already. He opens his “prophecy” with this bracing assertion: “I had noted in my state in the United States that a democratic state of society similar to the American model could lay itself open to the establishment of despotism with unusual ease … If despotism were to be established in present-day democracies, it would probably assume a different character. It would be more widespread and kinder. It would debase men without tormenting them.” Freedom is such a normal concept in American thought and rhetoric that the idea that our system could become …