1. As others have noted, this is a paraphrase from Judge Hare in 1889, not from Democracy in America itself. The gist is roughly accurate, though, and still worth grappling with.
2. Tocqueville’s fear was a tyranny of the majority, exercised through an overweening legislature. The Founders shared that fear. But it’s very hard to look at the trajectory of American democracy, and conclude it’s a story of a powerless executive humbled by Congress.
3. And Hare had a purpose for offering the quote—he, like many of his era, had come to view the impeachment of Andrew Johnson as a mistake. “The conviction of Andrew Johnson might have been the first step in the downward path." 
4. But as I wrote, "To deny the justice of Johnson’s impeachment is to affirm the justice of his acts. If his impeachment was partisan, it was because one party had been formed to defend the freedom of man, and the other had not yet reconciled itself to that proposition."
5. When Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, it was a plausible fear. By the time Hare paraphrased it to defend Andrew Johnson, it was an apology for a nation that had decided that racial equality was a mistake, or at least, not worth fighting for: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
