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One need only recall Tocqueville’s aspirational vision of American lawyers serving to restrain unruly mobs driven more by emotion than by reason to recognize that, when a member of the bar does the very opposite and endorses the “unreflecting passions” of a would-be tyrant and his followers, he betrays the legal profession, the rule of law, and the nation.

Writing in his 1831 political chronicle, Democracy in America, Tocqueville, ever the optimist, posited that those “who have made a special study of the laws derive from occupation certain habits of order … and a kind of instinctive regard for the regular connection of ideas, which naturally render them very hostile to the … unreflecting passions of the multitude.”

In his book, “The Spirit of Laws,” the Baron de Montesquieu laid out a path forward for the new republic that would balance its democratic impulses – which feared institutional and distant power and revered dispersed and localized power – and its nationalist impulses, which feared the rule of the mob, the ascendancy of an unreflecting reliance on reason, and lack of efficiency and energy in the government.

It is mechanical, unreflecting, consistently on-message — the purest near-living expression of data management to be found on Earth.

The unreflecting surface seems to wink.