Tocqueville's Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940In the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville warned that insufferable despotism would prevail if America ever acquired a national administrative state. Today's Tea Partiers evidently believe that, after a great wrong turn in the early twentieth century, Tocqueville's nightmare has come true. In those years, it seems, a group of radicals, seduced by alien ideologies, created vast bureaucracies that continue to trample on individual