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
The political scientist Benedict Anderson has argued that, in the modern world, nationalism, which he famously defined as the sense of the nation as “an imagined community,” was born of the colonial encounter between the “Old” and “New” worlds, and, arising out of empire and expansion, came into its own in the modern world as a distinctive species of political thought. Across history, American nationalism has come in different forms, from patriotic-militaristic statism, to cultural-chauvinistic, to religious. All, of course, have in some sense blended together in a mixture that has come to characterize the United States as a distinctive (and perhaps “exceptional”) imagined community.
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)
Other scholars have observed that ostensibly ascriptive, pre-political ethnic and racial identities have long been constitutive of the self-understandings of Americans as an imagined community. Forms of ethno-nationalism or racial nationalism have long held that membership in the US political community is premised upon ascriptive racial or ethnic characteristics, such as whiteness (racial), or Anglo-Saxon (ethnic), or white Anglo-Saxon (racial-ethnic) identity. These ascriptive nationalisms have been founded on different understandings, ranging from genetic to cultural. In practice, they have commonly intersected across American history with religious nationalism (e.g. the United States as an inherently white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation). All of these forms of nationalism have underwritten understandings of civic membership, belonging, and exclusion. To the extent that they are founded on ascriptive categories positing a fixed “identity,” they are presumptively unbridgeable and permanent.
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.
Creedal nationalism defines Americanism not ascriptively but as a willingness to subscribe to a set of normatively desirable and foundational principles – in most iterations, liberty, equality, and democracy. “True” or “Real” Americanism – full civic membership – is defined by a willingness to fully commit oneself to – and perhaps even give one’s life to defend – such principles. In contradistinction to ascriptive Americanism, creedal nationalism promises an open and inviting form of civic membership – on display, for instance, each year when thousands of immigrants of diverse races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions take a solemn oath of American citizenship. Upon swearing the oath – professing fidelity not only to the country’s laws, but also to its catechistic creed – they are presumed as American as anyone else, even those whose ancestors have been living in the United States for generations: they join the American national community as full civic equals.
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