The American Creed: Does It Matter? Should It Change?

American exceptionalism has come to have two meanings. For many politicians, it is a term of praise: the United States, compared to other countries, is unusually good. For social scientists and political philosophers, American exceptionalism presents an intellectual problem: why does the United States differ in significant ways from most other industrial democracies?

That the United States is different is the argument that links the diverse essays in Seymour Martin Lipset's book. "America continues to be qualitatively different" from other advanced industrial nations, Lipset writes. "It is the most religious, optimistic, patriotic, rights-oriented, and individualistic. With respect to crime, it still has the highest rates; with respect to incarceration, it has the most people locked up in jail. . . . It also has close to the lowest percentage of the eligible electorate voting, but the highest rate of participation in voluntary organizations. . . . It is the leader in upward mobility into professional and other high-status and elite occupations, but the least egalitarian among developed nations with respect to income distribution, at the bottom as a provider of welfare benefits, the lowest in savings, the least taxed, close to the top in terms of commitment to work rather than leisure." Lipset makes the important observation "that various seemingly contradictory aspects of American society are intimately related. The lack of respect for authority, anti-elitism, and populism contribute to higher crime rates, school undiscipline, and low electoral turnouts. The emphasis on achievement, on meritocracy, is also tied to higher levels of deviant behavior and less support for the underprivileged."

Lipset, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, has pondered American exceptionalism throughout his career in a number of books including The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1963) and Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (1990). He stresses the importance of U.S. political culture in the form of "the American Creed"--defined as "liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire"--to explain the differences between the United States and other industrial democracies.

EXCEPTIONALLY ALIKE

In American Exceptionalism, as in his previous studies on the subject, Lipset relies heavily on cross-national comparisons to prove that the United States is an "outlier" compared with a supposed European/East Asian norm. "European countries, Canada and Japan," he writes, "have placed greater emphasis on obedience to political authority and on deference to superiors." His own data, however, undermine his argument. "While America collected 31 percent of its GDP in tax revenues in 1991, other countries such as Sweden (52%), Holland (48%), Belgium (40%), and the United Kingdom (36%) were taxed at higher levels," Lipset notes. Why not put Britain together with the United States in the low-tax category? Similarly, Lipset writes, "As of the early nineties, overwhelming majorities, 87 percent of West Germans, 86 percent of Italians, and 75 percent of Britons, believe in levying higher taxes on the rich to produce greater income equality, as compared to a much smaller majority, only 74 percent, of Americans." The American majority on this issue is hardly "much smaller" than the British--the difference is one percentage point. The cultural gap appears to be greatest not across the Atlantic but across the English Channel.

More important, Lipset exaggerates the role of the American Creed in explaining why the United States is the way it is. America does have a distinctive political culture, characterized by a high degree of individualism and antistatism. But political culture--American, Japanese, or any other--is as much a response to social institutions and public policies as an explanation for them. In a sustained comparison of the United States and Japan, Lipset observes that "Japanese clearly exhibit much stronger ties to their employers than Americans do." Is this a result of some ancient Japanese cultural heritage or a reaction to the practice of lifetime employment that Japanese corporations adopted in the face of labor strife immediately after World War II? Conversely, in this era of downsizing, the attitudes of Americans toward their employers more likely reflect a rational assessment of the insecurity of their tenure than a tradition of American bourgeois individualism going back to the Founding Fathers. In the 1950s this same American culture exhibited a more "Japanese" relationship between large companies and their workers. And a supposedly consensual Japanese political culture was invoked to explain one-party rule and bossism in that country--until the recent appearance of multiparty politics and charismatic leadership.

Lipset also draws attention to the low and declining levels of voter participation in the United States, as though they were somehow an inevitable result of American political culture. He does not consider that they are a response to the voter registration regulations imposed by early-twentieth-century Progressives (who wanted lower turnout by the less educated and less wealthy) and to the penalty imposed on third parties by the first-past-the-post electoral system the United States shares with Britain. Reforms such as easy, same-day voter registration, weekend voting, and proportional representation might not bring U.S. voter participation levels up to First World norms--but then again, they just might.