Can the American Creed Be Revived?

At The American Interest Suzanne Garment lists twelve “rules” of the American creed which she characterizes as “the American Deal”:

The Deal has two parts, with six rules each. The first part reminds people who want to change the system why they shouldn’t expand their horizons too broadly or hold their fellow Americans in contempt. These first six provisions of the Deal tend to take care of themselves. The chief danger is that they’ll blow up in the faces of those who don’t give them enough respect.

Here are the first six:

Rule One: The Deal is federalism.
Rule Two: The Deal is Tocqueville’s America.
Rule Three: The Deal is that most Americans are, when push comes to shove, locals.
Rule Four: The Deal is that most Americans are religious, more or less.
Rule Five: The Deal is that Americans generally don’t express a desire to take other people’s property outright.
Rule Six: The Deal doesn’t generally include a hatred of the rich.

Of the second six rules she remarks:

Then, there is the second part of the Deal, the one reminding us that we’re Americans, not Hungarians or Poles. None of the elements of the second part of the Deal has unqualified or even natural support. Every one of them periodically disappears under one populist wave or another. To date, these elements have managed to re-emerge—but there are no guarantees.

and here they are:

Rule Seven: The Deal is liberalism.
Rule Eight: The Deal is republican restraint on the display of wealth.
Rule Nine: The Deal is a set of limits on inequality.
Rule Ten: The Deal is immigration.
Rule Eleven: The Deal is world leadership.
Rule Twelve: The Deal is tragedy.

Frankly, I’m skeptical of the viability of that creed today. For example, here’s her exposition on Rule Ten:

The country’s direction on this issue hasn’t been consistent; but it was set at the beginning of the republic, at a time when most Americans still thought of themselves as aggrieved citizens of Britain. In 1776 Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, argued that in fact America was not British but something new: the “asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.” Congress’s first law on the subject, the Naturalization Act of 1790, made U.S. citizenship available to any “free white person of good character” who had lived in the United States for two years.

Those terms don’t look especially liberal from the vantage point of the 21st century, but they were a down payment on Paine’s determination that we should be a country of immigrants.

Of course, that wasn’t exactly a definitive verdict. We’ve had periodic immigration crises since at least 1819, when Congress passed the Steerage Act to try to bring some order to the flood of immigrants that overwhelmed the major ports of entry after the War of 1812. As Peter Schuck points out in The New York Times, we are well overdue for a revision to the Deal, one that is concrete and reasoned enough to reduce the oppressive salience of the issue in U.S. politics. It’s going to be a heavy lift, but that’s what the Deal requires.

Note that there’s absolutely nothing in those paragraphs that justifies the sort of immigration we have today. The specifics it gives are “citizens of Britain” and “free white person of good character”. I don’t think that could be sold today. From 1920 to 1965 immigration was constrained in such a way as to preserve the demographic mix that prevailed in the U. S. in 1920 and to keep the percentage of immigrants in the country relatively low. There were forced “repatriations” at multiple times during that period to enforce those provisions. I don’t think that would fly today, either.

And Rule Eleven? That wasn’t part of the Deal until after World War II. Quite to the contrary we expressly rejected “world leadership” for the first 150 years of the Republic’s existence. A century ago Woodrow Wilson tried and failed to convince Americans of that rule. And that says nothing of the rest of the world’s tolerance of American leadership which I would characterize as something between strongly resisted and absolutely rejected.

All things considered I believe Ms. Garment’s “Deal” is a fair approximation of the American Creed but needs some tweaking. I also think that unless we embrace some version of it, we will have either violence or tyranny or both.
However much tweaking it receives I believe that a majority of today’s residents of the United States would reject it for one reason or another. I don’t think that Humpty Dumpty can be put together again.