e classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity—a HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023472 --- PAGE BREAK --- 16 phenomenon noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his masterful analysis of the origins of the French Revolution and raised again in the early 1960s by James Davies’s well known “J-curve” theory o

(think of Tammany Hall in New York City), and its state of development ranged crazily from European-influenced Manhattan to the anarchic Wild West. Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America at the time, shook his head at horrible urban slums, sweatshop child labor, slavery and persecution (or worse) of the indigenous

ected to fall further—an enormous challenge for a regime whose legitimacy depends on its ability to deliver consistent growth. At the same time, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in the 19th century, democracies always look weaker than they really are: they are all confusion on the surface but have lots of hidden