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

Much of the difference in aggregate public spending between the United States and other English-speaking democracies, which Lipset cites to prove American exceptionalism, results from a single factor: the absence of universal health care in the United States. Lipset does not take into account the tax subsidies in health care and other areas which, many argue, constitute an "invisible welfare state" that is relatively generous to the affluent and the middle class, if not the poor, in the United States. At any rate, if the United States could move dramatically closer to the statistical norm of developed countries by passing merely a single piece of legislation, how deep-rooted can American exceptionalism be?

In addition, Lipset's surveys of American attitudes are misleading because they erase cultural differences between regions in the United States. American regional politics--in particular, the politics of the most exceptional region in the United States, the South--is more responsible than universally shared American values for the peculiar structure of the American welfare state. From the 1930s to the 1990s, Southern members of Congress, whether conservative Democrats or Republicans, have been the chief impediments to the adoption of European-style social democracy in the United States. Under F.D.R., the very same conservative Southern Democrats who killed social programs that would have empowered poor whites and blacks in their region ensured the adoption of massive, centralized federal agricultural subsidy programs. If the South had won its independence in the Civil War, the northern remnant of the United States, free of Southern congressmen and senators, might well have followed a path much closer to those of Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, American political culture notwithstanding.

Lipset concedes that American exceptionalism has not prevented the United States from adopting many institutions, from federal welfare to an enormous peacetime military establishment, that were once thought utterly un-American. He admits that "major changes have occurred which have modified the original American Creed, with its suspicion of the state and its emphasis on individual rights. These include the introduction of a planning--welfare state emphasis in the 1930s, accompanied initially by greater class-consciousness and trade union growth, and the focus on ethnic, racial, and gender group rights which emerged in the 1960s." Meanwhile, Lipset acknowledges, the "statist" European nations are becoming more liberal in many respects: "The United States is less exceptional as other nations develop and Americanize. But, given the structural convergences in economy and ecology, the extent to which it [the United States] is still unique is astonishing." What is really astonishing is that a multiracial, continental country of 265 million people with a history of slavery and segregation should match the characteristics of relatively small, homogeneous European and Asian nation-states as closely as it does.

THE REPUBLICAN DEAD END

While Lipset is content to invoke the American Creed as an explanation for the country's uniqueness, Michael J. Sandel, the eminent Harvard philosopher, wants to alter America's cultural core, to make it less liberal and individualistic and more republican and communitarian. Sandel attempts to reinterpret twentieth-century American political history as a tragedy--the abandonment by political and intellectual elites of America's republican tradition of civic character-building in favor of a morally neutral, rights-based liberalism which, in both its left-wing and conservative varieties, leads to the attenuation and abandonment of community and the establishment of the "procedural republic." Sandel's thought reflects the new interest in questions of community that a number of prominent liberal and left thinkers, including Michael Walzer and the late Christopher Lasch, have shown in recent years.

"In the early republic," writes Sandel, "liberty was understood as a function of democratic institutions and dispersed power. The relation of the individual to the nation was not direct but mediated by decentralized forms of political association and participation." As proof, he offers Alexis de Tocqueville's idealized account of New England town meetings. "By contrast, liberty in the procedural republic is defined in opposition to democracy, as an individual's guarantee against what the majority might will." In Sandel's version of U.S. history, most of the parties in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America--Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, Whigs and Democrats--agreed that the goal of politics was "to cultivate in citizens the qualities of character that self-government requires."

According to Sandel, this noble vision was abandoned by narrow-minded trade unionists like Samuel Gompers, technocratic Keynesians, and consumer advocates who did not realize that an economy of mom-and-pop stores builds character more effectively than one of big retailers. "The effort to banish moral and religious argument from the public realm for the sake of political argument," Sandel maintains, "may end by impoverishing political discourse and eroding the moral and civic resources necessary to self-government." He devotes much of the book to criticizing the Supreme Court for undermining community by promoting tolerance of pornography and state neutrality in matters of religion. Along with the indifference of Keynesian liberals to the effects of economic policy on character, the libertarian activism of the Supreme Court, he argues, has contributed to the triumph of the procedural republic.