evidence: Though it went virtually unnoticed, April 16th marked the 150th anniversary of the death of one of the significant thinkers of modern times, author of the classic Democracy in America (1835/1840), Alexis de Tocqueville. Today Tocqueville is largely ignored in his native France, where the left-dominated intelligentsia dismiss him as "antidemocratic." Americans of all generations, however, have regularly turned to this nineteenth-century aristocrat to understand their past and future. [...] Without question Tocqueville regarded these features of America as portents of a great future. But other dimensions of American democracy troubled him, the poignancy of which is difficult to ignore today.