Economic egalitarianism is definitely not a part of the creed. On the contrary, it has also been closely associated with belief in the absolute superiority of free-market capitalism, unlimited economic opportunity, and consumerism.10 However, these facets of the creed are contested by larger numbers of Americans than are its political elements, which are believed in by overwhelming majorities. In recent decades, racial tolerance and equality have also come to be seen as essential components of the creed, and the rights of women are also mentioned—though these too are contested, in private at least, by considerable numbers of Americans. Informally, an important part of the creed is also the belief that America embodies and exemplifies the only model of successful modernity in general.
At the start of the twenty-first century, the contents of the American thesis are, of course, not exceptional to America; most are also held by the other developed democracies, and indeed in public at least, by most of the world. In its ultimate origins the creed is overwhelmingly indebted to a mixture of the British legal and religious tradition, and the British and French enlightenments. American democracy forms part of a subworld of Western democratic states, just as American capitalism, though it has highly specific features, is inextricably entwined with the world capitalist system as a whole.
However, two features of the creed are exceptional: the absolutist passion with which these beliefs are held, and the degree to which they are integral to American nationalism. Louis Hartz wrote of the creed’s “compulsive nationalism” and the “fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life.”11 The myths attendant on the creed include a very widespread belief that America is exceptional in its allegiance to democracy and freedom, and that America is therefore exceptionally good. And because America is exceptionally good, it both deserves to be exceptionally powerful and by nature cannot use its power for evil ends. The American Creed or thesis is therefore a key foundation of belief in America’s innate innocence, which is due in turn to the innate qualities of ordinary Americans. This faith underpins the belief of ordinary Tea Party members that “if only government would get off our backs” these qualities would allow American society and the American economy to flourish.12
According to Samuel Huntington, “it is possible to speak of a body of political ideas that constitutes ‘Americanism’ in a sense in which one can never speak of ‘Britishism,’ ‘Frenchism,’ ‘Germanism,’ or ‘Japaneseism.’” Americanism in this sense is comparable to other ideologies and religions…To reject the central ideas of that doctrine is to be un-American…This identification of nationality with political creed or values makes the United States virtually unique.”13
In fact, as noted in chapter 1, other states have also embodied their own versions of such a thesis in their own versions of civic nationalism. However, in most of these cases the thesis has either been publicly contested by many people, as in the case of France, or, as in the case of imperial China, has been, historically speaking, mainly the faith of national or imperial elites. What is unusual about America is the sheer unanimity of belief in these guiding national principles.
The Canadian sociologist Sacvan Bercovitch has described discovering in America “a hundred sects and factions, each apparently different from the others, yet all celebrating the same mission.” This ideological consensus, he said, is invested with “all the moral and emotional appeal of a religious symbol.” Discovering it gave him “some of the anthropologist’s sense of wonder at the symbol of a tribe.”14 At the start of the twenty-first century, the United States may indeed be the most truly ideological society on the face of the earth.
America is not, of course, the most ideological state on earth. A number of other states still claim an infinitely more rigorous, ruthless, and extensive right of control over the thoughts of their subjects than the American state ever has, or ever could. So did the Communist states in their prime. But even in their prime, these ideologies were resisted by large parts of the populations concerned, and after a few decades not only most of the intelligentsia, but most ordinary people as well lost all genuine belief in them, while continuing to go through the required motions in public. The same became true of theocratic Iran in the course of the 1990s.
Russian and Chinese intellectuals of my acquaintance who came to America in the 1990s after living in this atmosphere of private cynicism toward public ideology often reacted with utter astonishment, and some fear, to the way in which ordinary Americans glorify their country’s beliefs, institutions, laws, and economic practices in private conversations, not just as a matter of defensive patriotism, but with a sincere belief in their validity for all mankind: “They actually believe all this! No one is forcing them to say it!”15 Closely related to this is the sense of national mission: “All nations…have long agreed that they are chosen peoples; the idea of special destiny is as old as nationalism itself. However, no nation in modern history has been quite so consistently dominated as the United States by the belief that it has a particular mission in the world.”16
Even most American dissidents throughout history have sincerely phrased their protests not as a rejection of the American Creed as such, but, on the contrary, as a demand that Americans, or American governments, return to a purer form of the creed or a more faithful adherence to it. Groups that really step outside the creed soon find themselves marginalized or even suppressed. The mass of the white population at least simply takes the creed for granted.
Given the general stereotype of the United States as a new, young, and ever-changing country, it is important to note that one of the sources of the immense strength of American loyalty to American institutions is their antiquity. They have an older and less changed existence than in almost any other state in the world. For since the American Constitution was adopted in 1787, the great majority of states have undergone revolutionary institutional change. Even the British political system has changed far more fundamentally than the American system over these two centuries.
The principles underlying these institutions, and the American thesis that these institutions embody, are much older still. According to Huntington, “the principal elements of the English constitution were exported to the new world, took root there, and were given new life precisely at the time that they were being abandoned in the home country. They were essentially Tudor and hence significantly medieval in character…The institutional framework established in 1787 has, in turn, changed remarkably little in 175 years.”17
Far from being a “new” or “young” state, America therefore has some claim to be almost the oldest state in the world. It is “the oldest republic, the oldest democracy, the oldest federal system; it has the oldest written constitution and boasts the oldest of genuine political parties.”18
The origins of these American institutions go back to medieval and, more importantly, Tudor England, before the rise of centralizing monarchies on the continent of Europe and of centralizing parliamentary government in Britain. Huntington links the continuing belief of Americans in a fundamental, essentially unchanging law to the English medieval tradition: “nolumus mutare leges Angliae,” that is, “we do not wish to change the laws of England,” as the barons declared at Runnymede; thus “this old idea of a fundamental law beyond human control was given new authority by identifying it with a written constitution.”19 These then are the ancient beliefs and sentiments that filled the dry, rationalist carapace of the American Constitution.20
American civic nationalism has been central both to the assimilation over the centuries of huge numbers of immigrants and to America’s eventual transition from herrenvolk democracy to civilizational empire. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., declared at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”21
Thus the contents of the American Creed are of tremendous importance to America and to humanity. On many occasions throughout Americ
an history, the creed has led Americans not just to make sacrifices for their own countrymen and for humanity, but to question their national motives and improve their institutions and behavior. It also helps stand between the United States and certain imperial crimes, and indeed makes the exercise of direct empire by the United States less likely, for it enforces at least a surface respect for democracy and self-determination.
It could be said that the American thesis, like democracy in India, is also a matter of necessity for America. It is essential to preventing America’s immensely disparate and sometimes morally absolutist social, cultural, religious, and ethnic groups from flying apart. Creedal civic nationalism and belief in the value of the American thesis for America and mankind are perhaps the only things on which Pentecostalists in Texas and gays in San Francisco can agree.22
The American Creed, and the institutions it underpins, are indeed America’s greatest glory, and will be America’s greatest legacy to mankind after the United States itself has disappeared. The fruits of American economics may prove ambiguous or even disastrous in the long run, but the principles that have allowed masses of diverse people in an enormous land to live together and prosper without coercion will always have positive lessons to teach.
Restoring Innocence
Despite its great virtues, however, this civic nationalism, and the ideological consensus that underpins it, carry with them certain grave interlinked dangers. As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote:
Irony consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous…Our moral perils are not those of conscious malice or the explicit lust for power. They are the perils which can be understood only if we realize the ironic tendency of virtues to turn into vices when too complacently relied on; and of power to become vexatious if the wisdom which directs it is trusted too confidently.23
Of these perils, two in particular have been remarked on by American historians and commentators: conformism and messianism. To these can now be added the growing danger of ossification. Historically these dangers have usually been somewhat latent and held in check by American traditions of empiricism, pragmatism, and open debate.24 In moments of national shock and trauma, like 9/11, however, they tend to become active, and do much to shape America’s response. This may also be the case with the less sharp, but perhaps even deeper long-term trauma of America’s relative decline in the world, and the decline of the white middle class in America.
These tendencies inherent in U.S. civic nationalism draw on a set of common myths so deeply embedded as to operate beneath the level of most Americans’ consciousness. These myths are not strictly speaking part of the formal thesis or creed, but help give them much of their emotional force. These myths affirm, among other things, the idea of America’s innocence;25 or as President George W. Bush put it, “I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I’m—like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”26
As the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of 2002 stated: “Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic advantage. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty.”27
This belief in American innocence, of “original sinlessness,” is both very old and very powerful.28 It plays a tremendously important role in strengthening American nationalism and in diminishing America’s willingness to listen to other countries, viewed in turn as originally sinful.
This is in origin a New England puritan or “Yankee” myth stemming from the idea of the settlers as God’s elect, born again in the New World and purged of the sins of England and Europe. It was later enthusiastically adopted by grateful refugees from Europe and elsewhere fleeing persecution or war in their homelands.29 It received an early European endorsement in 1782 from Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, who celebrated the American as a “new man,” reborn in a kind of Rousseauian natural state in the wilderness and purged of the European past.30
The white South was historically suspicious of this myth, because they saw it as responsible for the (in their view) high-minded, high-handed, hypocritical Yankee moralizing that led the North to condemn the South first over slavery, then over civil rights. A strong, though unacknowledged echo of this historical position is to be found in the deep skepticism of the Southern patrician Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas concerning the messianic follies that in his view helped embroil the United States in Vietnam and other unnecessary disputes.31 This attitude is also reflected in the continuing skepticism of many Southern conservative Republicans concerning “nation building.” At the same time, however, the passionate American nationalism of this Southern tradition has also led them to strongly identify with the “city on a hill” image of America as part of their belief in America’s unique greatness and moral supremacy in the world.
As Richard Cohen wrote in 2003, asking how America could have gone to war with Iraq in the face of all evidence and warnings, “this [the Iraq War] was no mere failure of intelligence. This was a failure of character. Why?…Finally, there was our smugness—the sort of American exceptionalism that so rankles non-Americans. No one better exemplified that than Bush himself.”32
In 1980 Conor Cruise O’Brien quoted New York magazine as lamenting that “we lost our innocence in the seventies, and, for the first time, a war,” and commented,
the lost war is not hard to identify, but the lost innocence is worthy of respectful and inquisitive wonder. The French lost a war (admittedly not for the first time) in the Sixties, in Algeria, in much the same way and for much the same reasons as those for which the United States, ten years later, lost a war in Indochina. Negative generalizations are usually hazardous, but I offer confidently the proposition that no Frenchman wrote, and no French periodical published, at the end of the Sixties, any claim that France had lost its innocence as well as a war during that period…Yet the theme of American innocence—whether lost, preserved, or to be recaptured—is not a mere mawkish conceit, but represents a powerful and active ferment of meaning that has worked throughout American history.33
An unwillingness or inability among Americans to question American sinlessness feeds in turn a culture of public conformism in the United States, commented on across the centuries. “In the abstract we celebrate freedom of opinion as part of our patriotic legacy; it is only when some Americans exercise it that other Americans are shocked…Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted feature of the American national character.”34 Or to quote Louis Hartz: “Here is a doctrine which everywhere in the West has been a glorious symbol of individual liberty, yet in America its compulsive power has been so great that it has posed a threat to liberty itself. Actually Locke has a hidden conformitarian germ to begin with, since natural law tells equal people equal things, but when this germ is fed by the explosive power of modern nationalism, it mushrooms into something pretty remarkable.”35
This conformism is certainly true in my experience for large sections of the political, intellectual, and media worlds of Washington, DC, and the American ruling elites. Tocqueville (the most famous European admirer of America, it should be noted) declared that “I know of no country where there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America…The majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them.”36
Like the description of Nicolas I’s Russia by Tocqueville’s compatriot and contemporary the Marquis de Custine, this could be described as an exaggeration of the truth. After all, America has throughout its history produced famous dissidents. However, their
spheres have tended to be rather more limited than in many other developed countries, and restricted mainly, though not entirely, to the worlds of the intellect and the arts. The great dissident wave of the 1960s and early 1970s was to a considerable extent an epiphenomenon that was rejected by the mass of the American people. Moreover, dissent can be identified in part with certain regional and ethnic traditions in the United States that do not extend to the mass of the American people as a whole: “For all the lip service given to respect for cultural differences, Americans seem to lack the resources to think about the relationship between groups that are culturally, socially or economically quite different.”37
One source of the immense power of the American Creed and civic nationalism in American society is that they combined both the Enlightenment and the “protestantoid” religious strands of the old American tradition in a way summed up in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with its melding of biblical and liberal imagery. The kingdom of God became identified with the American Republic.38 As “mainline” Protestantism in most of the United States (but not, as we shall see, in the greater South) became more liberal and latitudinarian in the course of the twentieth century, so a diffuse form of vaguely protestantoid “civil religion” also came to form a central part of this national consensus. This in turn owed something to the deism of the Republic’s founders, who had also emphasized the central importance of religion for the survival of the Republic, without stipulating what it should be (though they certainly meant some variety of Protestant).
In President Eisenhower’s much-quoted words, “our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.”39 This identification of the positive civic virtue of religion with nationalism was strengthened still further by the struggle against “atheist Communism.”40 This diffuse, nondenominational Judeo-Christian religious culture in turn became part of what Will Herberg, Robert Bellah, and others have called America’s “civil religion,” composed of a mixture of the principles of the American Creed with a set of historical and cultural myths about America.41 This became the essential cultural underpinning of America’s present version of civic nationalism.
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