American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

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American Political Thought - Ken Kersch


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understood themselves to be statebuilders, aimed at creating a new commercial nation-state that could hold its own – protect and advance its “national interest” – in a global arena. To do so, the country would need a powerful and energetic centralized government with wide-ranging powers to tax, spend, promote economic development, aggressively protect its interests in the international arena through trade regulations, and, indeed, once possessed of a mighty military, fight. In this, localism was a potentially sapping centrifugal force. A relatively passive government chiefly concerned with administering justice and protecting private rights, moreover, would be wholly inadequate to the task.6

      Religious – or, more precisely, white Protestant – nationalism has been a remarkably consistent strain of American political thought. Many Americans have long conceived of their country as a faith community, founded on Protestant (or, much later, in response to the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism, “Judeo-Christian”) principles, which, they believe, have both constituted its populace as moral beings, actors, and citizens, and provided the theoretical foundations for its political institutions. As such, there is a long tradition of white Protestant nationalist political thought that spans all of American history, and has informed and underwritten the country’s politics.

      One common form of this religious nationalism has been Christian providentialism: the idea that the nation’s founding was divinely ordained. Christian nationalists believe that the nation’s very purpose was to provide a sanctuary for persecuted Christians, a place where they would be free not only to live in accord with the precepts of their faith, but also to live together collectively as a Christian polity – as a Christian commonwealth. While the country that eventually became the United States of America was initially settled for many reasons, not least commercial, it is nevertheless true that certain of the early settlements, particularly in Puritan New England, clearly imagined themselves as founding a “New Israel” – a place where, persecuted in their home countries, the godly and righteous could freely worship God, and realize their common faith. Indeed, many colonists often spoke of the new land in messianic terms – as providentially given to them by God for the advancement of His Truth and Word (also, in a different way, an “exceptionalist” vision). These settlers were concerned less with the “civic virtue” prescribed by republicans than with Christian virtue.

      The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace…. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that.

      James Baldwin (1963)

      The University of Pennsylvania political scientist Rogers M. Smith has argued that the standard inventory of American political thought paradigms – first, the Hartz thesis positing a hegemonic Lockean liberalism, and then the republican thesis – not only failed to recognize what he called “ascriptive Americanism” as a major current of American political thought, but also in critical ways contradicted those prevailing paradigms’ ostensibly orienting commitments to civic solidarity and free and equal liberty under law – the country’s purported “Idea” or “Creed.”7 More broadly, Smith argued that Americans have long ascribed certain traits and characteristics to members of certain groups and groupings, whether identified by race, ethnicity, sex, or gender – that is, they have long made ascriptions based on identity. Those holding political, economic, social, and cultural power, in part via the privileging of their own (favored) ascriptive characteristics, have denied full (or even any) recognition to the members of those groups as civic equals on the basis of those ascribed characteristics. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most African-Americans were enslaved – treated as species of property. Native Americans were considered savages, to be, variously, Christianized and assimilated, removed, or exterminated. Women were, in many ways (via, for example, coverture laws) considered to have legally merged with their husbands, and could not vote. These exclusions were not only practiced and legally enforced but spoken of and justified openly and extensively in the public and private spheres. As such, Smith argued, it makes little sense to describe the American political thought tradition as exclusively liberal and republican, as if the principles which those frameworks purported to cherish were applied and invokable by all.

      Both before and after Smith, however, some have pushed back against this understanding, insisting that “the American idea” or “creed” is real, and that these aberrational blots on the nation – even when they involved an overwhelming majority of the populace – are better conceived of not as evidence of the falseness of American claims to being a “creedal nation” but as a failure, slowly remedied across time, to live up to the noble and catechistic ideals on which the country had (genuinely) been founded.

      It may seem that, when compared with ethno-racial ascriptive or religious nationalism, creedal nationalism is inviting, inclusive, and egalitarian. But creedal nationalism has its own cast of outsiders: those who do not subscribe – or who are held by others to not subscribe – to the creed’s constitutive beliefs. Their beliefs – and, by extension, their persons – are classed as “anti-American,” or “un-American.” While these epithets would clearly be applied to those who expressly repudiate the polity’s creedal political principles, they have also been wielded against those – for example, socialists – whose political views, despite their protestations, are held by their opponents to have repudiated those principles. If their views are in the minority, their insistence that their views are consistent with the American creed, or even provide the best opportunity for its fullest realization, are likely to fall on deaf ears. As such, its apparent universalism notwithstanding, creedal nationalism can unleash its own forms of civic exclusion, and conduce to intellectual orthodoxy, conformism, and


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