What sort of a people are the Americans? I’ve been pondering this all week.
I considered it Monday as I laid plans for America Week at Christendom Reborn. On Tuesday when I wrote “Our Shining City”, on why I truly believe that the United States has contributed something vital to the history of Christendom. On Wednesday, musing on the Declaration as America’s “founding myth” and on how the Declaration of Independence stacks up against America’s Constitution in historical importance. On Thursday, when I wrote about being Catholic in America. How does it feel to leave a very quintessentially American faith (Mormonism) and join one with a more complicated relationship to these United States? Finally, rereading my friend Paul Seaton’s essay on how the Americans transcended Westphalia to embrace a deeper and more morally satisfying form of religious freedom.
It’s been a fun week.
Today, I want to think about America more broadly. Not just religious freedom. What sort of people are we? How will history see us? How does the world see us now?
I’m thinking about our strengths, and also our challenges except, this being America’s birthday, I’m especially focused on the good things. Where have Americans excelled? What is our great contribution to human history?
Let’s start with some fun things. We’ve never been very good at high art (symphonies, sculpture, painting) but we are great at low art. The whole world loves our popular music, watches Friends, does knockoff versions of our game shows. I think we’re pretty good storytellers, actually. That’s what fuels the movies, television, the creation of whole new genres of literature (sci fi, noir fiction, etc.). And we have some decent novelists too, though not of the intensely philosophical, angst-filled variety (like the Russians); our best novelists excel at telling a good story.
We’re trade giants, obviously. We practically invented the corporation. This is clearly absolutely essential to our global stature. Though I am of course familiar with the typical paleoconservative arguments, I can never quite get my head around the strangeness of trying to combine 1) intense American patriotism with 2) deep hostility to free trade. Because this is America, baby. How do you think we got here? It’s like a lumber-baron heiress who loathes forests. Actually, I would say in a global-trend-setting sense that our greatest strength has been first in trade, second in military might (winning the World Wars was pretty huge), third in popular culture. (Oddly, the paleo-populist types aren’t too excited about any of them. It’s rather a strange phenomenon if you think about it.)
I’ve already discussed our political-theory genius this week. But that genius isn’t confined to parchment and procedure; we’re also amazing athletes and inventors of team sports and these things are connected. I wrote an essay once at Law & Liberty that develops this point, especially the way our team-sport genius actually mirrors and springs from our commitment to ordered liberty.
We’re very good at science and inventing things, and have built some world-class universities. Yes, I know our universities have a lot of issues nowadays. But truly. We’ve built world-class universities. They have been a major asset for this nation, and still can be.
We love up-by-boostraps and the self-made man, and I also see the open temper as a very characteristically American thing. This should not be confused with universal friendliness or warmth. I once went to a public lecture by Mark Lilla, in which he humorously characterized American distinctiveness by describing strangers meeting in a bar, becoming quick friends, and ending the evening bellowing drinking songs and hugging each other. I thought, well? It could happen, but my time abroad has mostly been spent in the Middle East and Central Asia, and to people there, Americans seem like standoffish privacy-lovers, with a personal-space obsession. We hate close-talking for instance (e.g. people standing very close to you in a conversation). I think Mexicans, Tajiks, Ugandans and practically every Mediterranean people would be far likelier to behave in the manner he described.
But I do think Americans value straightforward etiquette, frankness, and people who, you might say, find a way to be themselves. (Without being obnoxious, ideally.) An assertive, self-motivated person can do, or get away with a lot here. We are individualists, and our manners and expectations reflect that.
We also genuinely value inclusion. It goes hand in hand with the “boostraps” thing, as well as our individualist commitments. If you can hack it, if you have the will to try to keep up, we generally consider that you should be allowed in the door. Caste systems are anathema to us. It’s ironic that DEI became such a thing here, because truly, I wonder if there has ever been a society that embraced a spirit of inclusion as much as Americans do. The Land of the Free. A nation of immigrants and strivers. I’m skeptical of any cultural reform effort that involves a more rigid or codified set of class distinctions, not because such things are an unqualified evil, but because it’s just not us. That’s not how Americans roll. This is not to say that we need to dedicate ourselves to the “middle class society,” but the lines between rich and poor, country folk and city folk, elite and commoner, will always be fluid and temporary here.
We like to build and do things. Lately Americans have been fairly demoralized and pessimistic, especially about the state of society, but I suspect we’ll snap out of it because fatalism really isn’t in our character. I understand that many small-government conservatives despair of ever recovering the can-do American spirit. Isn’t it mostly dead at this point? Haven’t we been gelded by bureaucracy, entitlements, endless manifestations of statism? I think… not.
I’m not a fan of any of those things! But when I start feeling gloomy about it, I compare my life in this country to my experiences abroad. If you’ve never spent much time around (say) former citizens of the Soviet Union, or of corrupt Middle Eastern regimes, it’s hard to fully grasp the difference. How Americans will see a problem and think, “OK, what to do? How do we fix that? What might work?” Not everyone is like that, or at least, some people take a long time to get there.
When I was in Uzbekistan, I used to make regular trips back and forth from Tashkent across some mountains, about a six-hour drive. There was a particularly dangerous curve at one point where (as multiple drivers told me) many people had been killed when the cars flew over the cliff. The road was rather narrow and graded poorly, and apparently quite dangerous in inclement weather. (I would check for inclement weather before leaving, and occasionally delayed my trip if it looked bad.) Since drivers loved to talk about this Dead-Man’s Curve as we passed it, I would go ahead and ask them: have they considered regrading the road? Adding a guardrail? Something? They would shrug. The idea seemed novel to them. I mean, we’ve all gotta go sometime, right?
Imagine Americans just allowing cars to keep flying over cliffs, year in and year out, and not bothering to summon an engineer. It’s unthinkable.
This is also a very beautiful country. Mountains. Stunning sea cliffs. All those amber waves of grain (which, by the way, could be another great asset if we ever faced global famine). I love the variety of landscapes here, but also the variety of little sub-cultures that thrive in all the different pockets of America. Sometimes this causes civil tension, but not as often as you might think. Americans’ live-and-let-live ethos, all things considered, is quite strong. This is another thing that stands out to me when I compare with my experiences of other countries.
Of course, we have problems. We aren’t perfect. It’s unclear whether we can maintain what we have, or for how long.
But it’s a great blessing to be an American. Don’t forget. Don’t ever forget.