What is the essence of Tocqueville's insights rightly (that is, of course, in the above version) understood? The essence is that the enlightened democratic age is the age where all people have a right to be a master of their own orders, of their own accounts of the world, of their own narratives. As feminists will readily assert, this struggle for the mastery of one’s own narrative continues today. Feminist writings on the history of citizenship have also helped us further understand how responsibility for one's order in one's own universe has been accorded to more and more people, concluding that "The history of the political concept of Bürger/citizen/citoyen, of the equal among equals, can be identified first of all as a political strategy of property-owning heads of households."  In other words, the movement toward equality in Europe was, in the beginning, a political strategy of a certain (bourgeois) caste who was beginning to have success independent of the old feudal order and relying on their own accomplishments rather than on high birth. This often urban class of educated, self-employed male citizens sought access to political power and was in need of a new narrative, one that would reflect and legitimize the newly evolving reality of new orders, a narrative which we generously abstract as liberalism today, and which was a brew of republican, democratic, religious-moral and liberal ideas back then. Founded on the idea that decisive for the political place of an individual in the political order was his (certainly not her) ability to reason (Kant's idea), liberalism was a bastard both of the new kind of religious narrative (Protestantism in Tocqueville's account and Weber's reading), and of the more secular, state-building conceptions (the rational man, separation of powers...) of the Enlightenment project. As a narrative detailing a new political order, it provided a new model of human beings as autonomous, rational and utility-maximizing citizens. Though the accent was set differently by different writers at different times, the liberal narrative definitely made a great career in the western world, giving rise to the modern western market (however free), the idea of universal human rights (eventually including full citizenship rights for almost everybody previously excluded), and of governments built to serve and protect these rights. Having arrived in 1998, the most prominent liberal writer, John Rawls, has, according to his own narrative, freed liberalism from all moral and religious doctrines and has elevated it from the sphere of competing doctrines (narratives) to the status of a free-standing political conception of justice. Public discourse, in the Rawlsian narrative, is supposed to be a dispassionate discourse in the style of Supreme Court deliberations, effectively excluding religious or moral narratives from partaking in political discourse on the ground that the liberal state as a mediator between citizens can not accept partisan language.
    The liberal narrative has produced a largely liberal order - so far, so good? No. Liberalism and its implications, once a legitimate project to obtain rights in the political realm, has had a spill-over effect on the private realm as well. The narrative of the rational, self-reliant autonomous individual has produced institutions such as an economy and a political order that is blind to difference and open to competition, and according produced mores and habits, following which, essentially, the fittest survive. While John Rawls does not entirely do away with parochial identities - just assigning them to the non-political realm - there are also such liberals who have been more radical messengers of market-liberalism (David Gauthier and his idea of the liberal citizen as rational utility-maximizer with season tickets to the opera ) or of self-creation and self-fulfillment (Richard Rorty), who both bash traditional, local and religious moralities, calling for dedivinization (Rorty) and justifying the "replacement" of "less advanced" local or otherwise particular moralities - a very enlightened project (see above). Liberalism's tendency towards these universal claims does not only exhibit a great deal of arrogance toward essentials of parochial identities, but also betrays the own liberal heritage of being a good - and, as Rorty himself has demonstrated - contingent project. Clearly, this is problematic.
    Is Liberalism then "too universal"? Not necessarily. It's obvious ignorance towards particular moralities and narratives that entail them is on one hand a good political strategy, and is fulfilling much of what Rawls thought it could do: provide a language, and institutions that are relatively neutral.  But on the other hand, it has created the postmodern secular disenchanted McWorld that provokes Jihad, to say it in Benjamin Barber's terms. Because the growing disenchantment, the alienation from a world seemingly beyond control, and the flight into particular identities that a liberalism universally understood cannot comprehend, political liberalism needs to fear the loss of allegiance of citizens, who, so far, might remain citizen primarily as a result of habit and complacency.  In any case, the liberal narrative needs to learn how to appreciate more particular narratives and identities again, and the societal cohesion they provide.
    What can Tocqueville help modern liberalism, or better: modern democratic citizens? Tocqueville had foreseen the problems of the liberal democracy that eventually had to turn into the disenchanted, secular, competitive, and interest-driven assembly of restless and withdrawn citizens of Rorty's and Gauthier's narratives, both of whom have captured aspects of this whole picture, and have loved these fragmented aspects . His own narrative of a liberal democracy oscillating between freedom (hopefully) and equality (necessarily) could temper the universal zeal of contemporary political liberalism, and refocus the energy of liberalism in building a civil society where particular identities are being welcomed, yet with the conscious effort to find common links, and where both the liberal secular identity of citizens and the more particular identities of members of one or the other pack picknicking in the underwood of the mind in search for authentic existence temper the zeal of one another.
What concretely can Tocqueville contribute? We have already established his modern enlightened democratic history as a continuos fight for conditions that enable one to be the master of one's own narrative. We have also seen that for all the political fights in the public arena for the project of one's narrative, this project has now become increasingly private, or, as Robert Bellah has observed about the middle-class Americans and about "the cultural resources they have for making sense of their society and their lives": "We described a language of individualistic achievement and self-fulfillment that often seems to make it difficult for people to sustain their commitments to others, either in intimate relationships or in the public sphere."  In other words, in the political realm, the liberal democratic order that allows for particular life-stories has been successfully established politically now, and people retreat from a publicly shared project - the establishment and conservation of this new narrative/order - to their own project of a personal narrative along the lines of individualistic achievement and self-fulfillment. Solidarity and cohesion, the forces upholding the new liberal political narrative/order in the past, are suffering.