American Political Thought. Ken Kersch
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Two of the most emblematic statements of American creedalism were made by outside observers of US political culture, the French aristocrat and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987). Both are at once celebrations and critiques.
De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) has been widely adopted by Americans as a seminal text of American creedalism. Tocqueville was part of a flotilla of European visitors who came to the Jacksonian United States to observe and reflect upon the extraordinary spectacle of a country in which the constituent people, the demos, were their own rulers. Democracy in America is an engaging mixture of dispassionate observation, sociological description and reportage, analytical-philosophical reflection, and normative evaluation and assessment – much of which was speculative, provisional, and prognosticative. An early social scientist in the modern sense, Tocqueville observed that Americans professed certain principles of political thought and, moreover, that, in some ways, they lived, or sought to live, by the lights of those principles. Tocqueville then went out and observed what Americans actually did and said, and identified patterns. He additionally observed the ways that key institutions of American life functioned. Tocqueville then stepped back to consider both the present and future implications of their dynamics. Where he saw problems, he considered the possibility that other dynamics and institutions might offer potential remedies, or at least mitigations.
Tocqueville’s observations – about the role of women and religion, about lawyers, about New England township government, and innumerable other aspects of American life as he observed it – and his often prescient analysis of their implications, are too extensive to canvass here. But one preoccupation of his is worth setting out: his extended consideration of the implications of what he took to be the pervasive American belief in (democratic) equality – for which, it is worth underlining, his point of comparison, his yardstick, was not an abstract ideal (or, for that matter, twenty-first-century standards) but contemporaneous Western Europe. Tocqueville was attracted by the trend toward equality he saw in America. He thought it boded well for the future of liberal freedom in the world. At the same time, however, he tempered his celebration with reservations and concerns. The faith of Americans in democracy and equality threatened traditional understandings of hierarchy and authority, many of which had long undergirded much of the peace, good order, manners, and mores of western societies, and their core institutions like families and churches. Throughout history, most people had taken their basic opinions and understandings from hierarchical authority and traditions. What might happen, Tocqueville wondered, as the commitment to democracy and equality, with the critiques they entail of hierarchy, tradition, and authority, unspooled to reach new and previously unimagined destinations?
Tocqueville pondered, and speculated. He expressed concern about the emergence of a “tyranny of the majority.” In the absence of the traditional sources of authority and hierarchies in a democracy, the people, he predicted, would increasingly take their opinions from what those around them were thinking. As such, he posited that democratic America’s ironic fate might be that its thorough-going individualism might end, paradoxically, in a stultifying conformism: while everyone would ostensibly be free to think and do as they pleased, most would end up thinking and doing what everyone else was. The country’s loudly professed commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of thought would end up, Tocqueville ventured, with very little freedom of opinion.
Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944) was a landmark study commissioned by the New York-based Carnegie Corporation that influenced the American civil rights movement and public thinking about civil rights more generally. In that two-volume report, Myrdal posited an “American Creed” that largely reflected liberal values of liberty, equality, and justice for all – which he took to be widespread among Americans, and sincerely held. That said, Myrdal argued that, in key respects, chiefly with regard to race, the country had as yet failed to live up to its creedal ideals, (Similar views had long been expressed, in diverse ways, by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the feminist framers of the Seneca Falls Declaration on Women’s Rights, and other “aspirationalists” – and, for that matter, by “declinists,” who focused on corruptions and fallings away.)
Critical race theorists and Rogers Smith have taken exception to Myrdal’s framing. The commitment to ascribed identities, they have argued, had always been constitutive of the nation’s laws, practices, and self-understandings. Put otherwise, it was not the exception but the rule. As such, according to Smith’s “multiple traditions thesis,” American political thought needed to afford “ascriptive Americanism” full and equal status as a constitutive paradigm of American political thought.
Many others of note both before and after Myrdal, ranging from Hector St. John de Croevecoer, to Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, to Ernest Tuveson (Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, 1968), to Samuel Huntington (American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, 1981), have articulated creedal understandings and visions of American political thought. A closely associated genre are works that have posited an “American character” or an “American mind,” such as Frederick Jackson Turner (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893), David Potter (People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character, 1954), or David Hackett Fischer (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, 1989). Both the creedalist and “American character” genres posit a set of quintessentially American beliefs and inclinations. They advance a diverse set of arguments about their ostensible roots, ranging from the country’s distinctive geographic and material conditions to the national/ethnic/racial characteristics – the demographics – of the people who populated it. Notably, it was only a short step from this approach, in the minds of some of these scholars, to the positing of the underlying values and principles to which “we,” as Americans, are ostensibly committed, and the mind and character “we” ostensibly share. Such homogenizing and essentializing theses, while they remain attractive to many, are also, these days, quite controversial. This is because they not only tend to posit a broad consensus among a diverse and disparate collection of people, but additionally suggest that that consensus has been largely fixed across time, across which the United States experienced many changes, not least in the composition, and political agency, of its populace.
While these understandings, and American creedalism, are typically taught as philosophies or coherent wholes, a variety of observers have seen their importance in American life not as rooted in a deliberate philosophical choice among Americans but in the conditions of their settlement and demographics, and their economic status and class. They have also been embodied in and informed by narratives and stories.
Stories About America
Among political theorists especially, liberalism and republicanism are typically understood, and taught, as political philosophies. They start from core premises and build outward to construct logically coherent and cohesive theories of government, which can then be critiqued, criticized, revised, refined, or rejected. While the political thought of Americans has certainly been informed by underlying political philosophies, however, it has also been informed by narratives and stories, which have their own dynamics different from those involved in arguing a point of political philosophy.
In later work, Rogers Smith wrote about American political thought as (also) being informed, if not foundationally structured, by a set of “people-making,” “ethically constitutive stories.” These stories look to and interpret the nation’s past, offering shared readings of the country’s mores in light of stories about where their tellers imagine the country has been and is going. These might be stories of spiritual aspiration, or prodigal wandering, of anointment or chosenness, or foresakenness, of belonging, privilege, or exclusion, of restoration or redemption, of treachery or betrayal, of decline or triumph. One way to think about such stories is that they are bids at meaning-making, whether by an individual, a group, or the political community as a whole. To be effective, such stories (or narratives) will appeal not just to the intellect but also to the emotions, inspiring feelings of loyalty, resentment, pride, anger, hope, and even love. Such stories are a staple of