That quote appears to be the creation of an editorial writer in the 1950s:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville#Misattrib...

I love that quote but it should be mentioned that it is actually misattributed to de Tocqueville. Doesn't make it any less true though.

The term, bribery, is extremely subjective in this context.

It's the same ephemerality as saying someone is a hater of "Freedom".

It makes an easy soundbite but what does that even mean?

I think most people use the concept of being for or against "Freedom" to refer to the opposite sides of the bottom-up versus top-down modes of economic development and governance.

Certainly, it's an over-generalization, and the word freedom is used specifically to evoke an emotional response, but I don't think it's devoid of meaning.

An unfortunate side-effect of having a democracy with 300 million plus people in it, is that to a certain extent these sort of over-generalizations are a necessary part of coalition building.

Overgeneralizations? You mean "propoganda"?

Coalition? You mean "fear fueled mob"?

Not sure what you mean by a bottom up government but the buzzwords are flowing I'm assuming it involves something along the lines of privatizating everything.

I think that is actually part of the "Cycle of Democracy" by Dr. Alexander Tytler.

Any quote I don't know the origin of, I've taken to attributing to Taylor Swift. It works pretty well.

"Never trust what you read on the internet" -Abraham Lincoln