Americanism: The Capacity to Resist Ideologues

I write here in a synoptic way, summarizing themes addressed more fully [elsewhere] for the purpose of concisely clarify­ing the meaning of Americanism. Let me open with the words on the subject from a representative expert, Theodore Roosevelt, who said the following just over a century ago:

“There is one quality which we must bring to the solution of every problem,–that is, an intense and fervid Americanism. We shall never be successful over the dangers that confront us; we shall never achieve true greatness, nor reach the lofty ideal which the founders and preservers of our mighty Federal Republic have set before us, unless we are Americans in heart and soul, in spirit and purpose, keenly alive to the responsibility implied in the very name of American, and proud beyond measure of the glorious privilege of bearing it.” (1894)¹

I shall suggest that it is, indeed, Americanism that best symbolizes who we are and shall understand that term as designating the “com­mon sense” of the country’s founding generation — its homonoia (like­mindedness) in Aristotle’s usage, or senso commune in Vico’s terminol­ogy. This is the way Thomas Jefferson and John Adams seem to have understood the term when they coined it at the end of the eighteenth century. This understanding therefore appeals both to the old and new science of politics as denoting a complex matter of fundamental importance.

Once the meaning has been clarified a bit, I shall try, by implication at least, to indicate how to meet some of the challenges we face in preserving and defending the convictions and the way of life historically built on Americanism. In this as in so much else Plato showed the way in the Laws whenhe characterized the process of pre­serving a just regime as mache athanatos (an undying struggle), a process our American forebears translated by the defiant phrase: eternal vigilance is the price of liberty! Theuniversalism of Americanism was an element from the beginning and constitutes part of American exceptionalism. As one scholar explains matters:

“The self-interpretation of American society was correctly covered by the expression Americanism. It functions as the instrument of the self-understanding of a national universe; it also, however, takes the stage with a universal claim and constructs a cosmos that encompasses God, the world, man, society, and history in the American [mode]. The word Americanism originally referred to transatlantic neologisms but was used as early as the era of the Founding Fathers as a symbol for an American interpretation of order . . . .  In this context Americanism means . . . awareness of a specific American mode of existence.”³

The heart of the matter, and its most delicate aspect, is to connect Americanism with the biblical faith of Americans as the chief source of its strength and enduring resilience–and of its frequent arousal of anti-American sentiments from ideologues of every stripe, those self-anointed “elites” at home and abroad who readily enlighten and deni­grate us at every waking moment on every conceivable subject. We re­member that Burke identified the basis of the American consensus in the dissenting branch of Protestantism. Publius identified Providence’s gift of “one united people” “speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government” (Federalist No. 2).

Christianity as the Source of American Success

Tocqueville stressed one must never forget that religion gave birth to America and that American Christianity has kept a strong hold over the minds of the people, not merely as a philosophy exam­ined and accepted, but as “an established and irresistible fact which no one seeks to attack or defend.”⁴ Not to be thought merely old-hat ideas, Samuel Huntington in 2004 challenged Americans to “recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions, and values that . . . have been the source of their liberty, unity, power, prosperity, and moral leadership as a force for good in the world.”

He forecast that, unlike the twentieth century, which was defined by contending ideologies, the twenty-first will be marked by the “revenge of God,” who was pre­maturely certified dead, in fact murdered, by such nineteenth-century luminaries as Hegel and Nietzsche–i.e., by the resurgence of religions, with culture and ethnicity replacing ideology as the central terms of ref­erence. Anglo-America was a Bible-based culture for three hundred years, as Trevelyan observed, finding this stupendous religious move­ment unlike anything in the annals since Saint Augustine.

What are the consequences for Americanism? A great many, of which I mention only two here: first, a theory of human being as created imago dei, each person imperfect and sinful, yet graced with the defining unique capacity of communion with his Creator as this is experientially apperceived in the New Birth: an inward experience and assurance of election, a process of salvation that runs from conversion and justifica­tion, toward sanctification in imitation of Christ–a spiritual movement of maturation that runs from “ruin to recovery” of the divine image, as we have seen it powerfully argued in the soteriology of Isaac Watts and John Wesley during the eighteenth-century revival we call the Great Awakening.

Second, there is a pervasive understanding of the course of human events as providentially guided, even as it is effected by human agents, i.e., by individuals exercising dominion through reason and volition over the creation as citizens no less than as pilgrims living in collaborative faith-grace partnership in immediacy to God. In both respects the In-Between reality of time and history is consciously re­affirmed, vitally experienced as tensionally structured by the competing pulls of worldly immanent and transcendent divine reality.

So understood, Lincoln’s “almost chosen people”⁶ more often than not implies humility rather than hubris, as it has played out in American public affairs. Jingoism and imperialism are excesses, deformations–even tinging policy debates–of this “choseness,” rather than optimal expressions of it. The sentiment of feeling chosen⁷  is an expression of trembling assurance, but also one of a constant supplication for divine favor akin to that symbolized in the parable of the Prodigal Son who rejects, strays, and returns seeking mercy in a dynamic of faith experi­enced in rebellious apostasy, repentance, forgiveness, and renewed com­munion familiar in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament as well as in the Gospels (cf. Luke 15 with its echo of Psalm 51).

Government to Serve the People

The keen awareness of this dynamic in the consciousness of the American com­munity at the time of the founding is reflected in many sources, but perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in the Continental Congress proclamations of national days of prayer, humiliation, repentance, and thanksgiving at various points during the Revolution–and intermit­tently proclaimed thereafter in our history as well. Such a day was pro­claimed, it may be recalled, as the very first act of President George W. Bush’s presidency in January 2001.⁸ 

The Declaration of Independence⁹ is a primary text for any under­standing of Americanism and a concise, creedal statement of its mean­ing. But to be rightly understood it must be placed in the biblical context just limned. The evocation of transcendent divine Being in the Creator-creaturely relationship and the sense of providential governance of human affairs beyond any sectarian divisions are authoritatively com­municated therein, as is also an anthropology hinting of man as imago dei and as, thereby, indelibly stamped with Liberty, expressed in the rhetorical mode of inalienable rights reflective of the Creator’s salient attributes. The “Lockean” liberal political theory therein advanced thus ontologically foots on this anthropology as demanding consent for legitimacy of laws and of government itself, whose powers are thus in­herently limited and whose cardinal purpose is salus populi: to serve its citizenry and not they it. The Declaration expressed the Whig consensus of Americans at the time, Jefferson later said.

Jefferson and Adams meant all of this when they coined the term Americanism as early as 1797. But they also meant the republicanism nurtured in Western political philosophy by the most famous writings of our civilization, from the Israelite republic of seventy Elders (Num­bers 11 and Deuteronomy 16, revived by James Harrington and Tom Paine), to Aristotle’s “mixed” regime and rule of law, to Aquinas (whom Lord Acton thought the “first Whig”), to the Commonwealthmen of the English seventeenth century, especially John Milton and Algernon Sidney, whose language is soaked in biblical and classical understanding. From Richard Hooker by way of Locke their Americanism embraced the great principle that “laws they are not which public approbation hath not made so,” an insistence upon consent that gave the American Revolution its motto, if it had one.

The Constitution and laws of the land were intended, when time came, to inculcate republican virtues and customs into the minds and hearts of the citizenry and make them the habitual educational foundation of civic consciousness, thereby over time forming the uniquely American character. We may also mention that James Madison, as part of his own education, stayed on an extra term at the College of New Jersey to study Hebrew with John Witherspoon, so as to read the Old Testament in the original as he did the New Testament in koine Greek.This was the golden age of the classics in America, and the educated generation knew the Bible inside out and the Greek and Latin (especially “Tully”) classics as sec­ond nature.

Scripturally Grounded Common Sense

What emerges if we take the founding moment as paradigmatic for our purposes is a body of writing and thought in which faith in divine governance in human affairs (to remember Benjamin Franklin in the Philadelphia Convention) is buoyed by a sense of history that teeters uneasily and expectantly on the edge of possible eschatological fulfill­ment through the Parousia, a tenuous “enthusiasm” kept in check by the impenetrable obscurity of divine mysteries, one tempered by the rational watchful waiting that marks the human condition with uncer­tainty no less than expectancy, with the end to come like a thief in the night.¹⁰ This scripturally grounded commonsense rationality Franklin’s Poor Richard captured in the maxim “Work as if you were to live 100 years, pray as if you were to die tomorrow.” ¹¹

The new epoch sensed to be possibly dawning was symbolized on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States in the slogans “The year of our daring–1776” and “Novus ordo seclorum–The new Order of the Ages,” with the Eye of Providence presiding over an unfinished pyra­mid. Not my will but Thy will be done, the prayer goes. No more than any other positive human achievement might any ecumenic kingdom ever be merely man’s affair. But like every other great truth, this deli­cate matter too can be vulgarized and deformed by willful sophistry.

The fifth great strand of Americanism, along with the Bible, republi­canism, so-called Lockean liberalism, and the classics, is common law constitutionalism. This tradition of law in practice, word, and experi­ence mightily evoked the great Tree of Liberty, the ancient constitution, Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, Sir John Fortescue’s Lancastrian constitution as revived two centuries later by Sir Edward Coke, whose crabbed Institutes became the reigning textbook for America’s lawyers, as Jefferson attested. With it came a sturdy and intricate historical ju­risprudence to augment the jurisprudence of divine and Stoic natural law that played such a key role in cogently justifying departure from the realm of England.

When in old age Adams and Jefferson finally patched up their differences and wrote the great exchange of letters we have from them, Adams neatly identified the sources of homonoia, or unity of mind and spirit (Americanism), that carried the day for the Good Old Cause as Whig Liberty and Christianity. He fervently af­firmed (in 1813) to his old comrade of battles now long past–his fel­low “Argonaut,” as he called Jefferson: “Now I will avow, that I then believed, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the existence and attributes of God, and those Principles of Liberty are as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System.”

Such Americanism–a highly differentiated complex of vital beliefs deeply held, forming the infrastructure of rational politics, adapting and augmenting as exigency demands–has sustained the nation into the present. Perhaps it still remains alive and well in the heartland de­spite all social amnesia, the educational depredations of ideologues and post-modernists, and the insidious deculturation wreaked by men­dacity, neglect, and blissful ignorance. It has certainly structured resolve and from time to time been strengthened in moments of crisis and na­tional peril, by decisions to fight for what the United States took to be right and in the national interest–most lately our just wars, both hot and cold, against the great tyrannies of the twentieth century, and the present war against terrorism. And it inspired by its potent universalism the French Revolution and both abolitionism and the civil rights revolution in this country.

Modern Gnostic Variants of Secularism

Of course, especially by the steady affirmation as cardinal truth of man’s tension toward the abiding divine Ground beyond nature and beyond all temporal reality, it has enraged the alienated and en­lightened intellectuals who prefer their own trendy reductionist ideol­ogies, favorite corrupting modern Gnostic variants of secularism. Such superior persons derisively sneer at the bucolic quaintness of those (including our founders, such notable patriots as Teddy Roosevelt, and most of the rest of us) who are unable to understand–as they well do–that all things are permitted, that might is right, and that the highest being for man is man himself. Throw in a dash of envy for material success, economic and political preeminence, and you have a recipe for being hated by voluble “elites” far and wide, at home and abroad–much to the bewilderment of ordinary folk and normal people.

“Anti-Americanism is at base a totalizing, if not a totalitarian, vision,” one acute French observer explains, and he continues:

“The peculiar blindness of fanaticism can be recognized in the way it seizes on a certain behavior of the hated object and sweepingly condemns it, only to condemn with equal fervor the oppo­site behavior shortly after–or even simultaneously . . . . According to this vision . . . Americans can do nothing but speak idiocies, make blunders, commit crimes; and they are answerable for all the setbacks, all the injustices and all the sufferings of the rest of humanity.”¹³

The fracturing of the sense of community fostered by Americanism proceeds apace at home, too. An insightful inventory of the various in­gredients of anti-Americanism by a leading political scientist lays stress especially on the fashionable views of post-modernism, so dear to influential intellectual elites and widely disseminated in college class­rooms, views eminently represented by the philosopher Martin Hei­degger in his late phase.

For Heidegger, America (for him then rivaled only by the Soviet Union in odiousness) embodies all that is despicable in modern progressive life. It is the existential enemy of Man and of civilization itself, he asserts in Nietzschean overtones. As James Caesar summarizes:

“Man needs an enemy to maintain his spirit. America is that enemy, and its threat is both external and internal. The internal threat is most insidious. America embodies all that is the worst in us, all that must be purified. America is the demonic, the thing inside us that is slowly stripping us of any spiritual quality. But though it is inside us, America does not fully possess us. We are not yet fully Americanized.”¹⁴

This is the enemy to be fought against by “us”–Europeans or “we Germans of the Fatherland.” World War Two unfortunately did not end the menace, it seems. The struggle continues in a multiplicity of ways. It is led by alienated self-loathing “homeless” elites unified from several ideological perspectives only by their own misery and by con­temptuous disdain for the spiritual, material, and intellectual traditions of both the Enlightenment and of the Christian west still naively, crassly, and vigorously embraced by most normal Americans.

Notes

This excerpt is from Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America (University of Missouri Press, 2006)

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