When the political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) visited the infant United States in 1831, he was struck above all by the "equality of condition" that prevailed there.
He was a French nobleman with aristocratic biases, but his American observations forced the conclusion on him that equality was the way of the future, not only in the New World but in the Old as well. The evidence, once his eyes had been opened, was unmistakable. "The whole book which is here offered to the public" — "Democracy in America" — "has been written under the impression of a kind of religious terror produced in the author's mind by the view of that irresistible revolution ... It is not necessary that God himself should speak in order that we may discover the unquestionable signs of his will." God's will, Tocqueville had discovered, was "equality of condition."
Agrarian America gave way to industrial-capitalist America, and equality got swamped. A Tocqueville returned to life circa 1985 would have been more impressed by Japan. Here, a rough equality really had taken shape. Executive salaries were modest, rank-and-filers earned enough to make most of them feel securely middle class, and the down-and-out poor were numerically negligible. Effort, not wealth, opened the doors to higher education. Americans took note. In 1983, an American professor of education was quoted by Time magazine as saying, "The whole culture (of Japan) is pervaded by the ethic that with true effort you can succeed; that if you're not achieving, you haven't tried hard enough."