Reforming the “American Idea”

I strongly recommend that you read Yoni Appelbaum’s article at Atlantic, “Is the American Idea Doomed?”. Dr. Appelbaum opens the piece with the founding of the magazine of which he is an editor:

On may 5, 1857, eight men sat down to dinner at Boston’s Parker House hotel. They had gathered to plan a magazine, but by the time they stood up five hours later, they had laid the intellectual groundwork for a second American revolution.

These men were among the leading literary lights of their day, but they had more in mind that night than literary pursuits. The magazine they envisioned would, its prospectus later promised, “honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.”

He goes on to explain what those founding editors thought of as the “American idea”:

Across Europe, the 19th century had dawned as a democratic age, but darkened as it progressed. The revolutions of 1848 failed. Prussia busily cemented its dominance over the German states. In 1852, France’s Second Republic gave way to its Second Empire. Spain’s Progressive Biennium ended in 1856 as it began, with a coup d’état. Democracy was in full retreat. Even where it endured, the right to vote or hold office was generally restricted to a small, propertied elite.

On the surface, things appeared different in Boston, where The Atlantic’s eight founders—Emerson, Lowell, Moses Dresser Phillips, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Lothrop Motley, James Elliot Cabot, Francis H. Underwood, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—dined in May 1857. Almost all adult males in Massachusetts, black and white alike, could vote, and almost all did. Almost all were literate. And they stood equal before the law. The previous Friday, the state had ratified a new constitutional amendment stripping out the last significant property qualifications for running for state Senate.

But even in Boston, democracy was embattled. The state’s government was in the grip of the nativist Know-Nothings, who resented recent waves of immigrants. That same Friday, voters had ratified an amendment imposing a literacy test for voting, a mostly symbolic effort at exclusion. But slavery, the diners believed, posed an even greater threat to democracy. Most of them had been radicalized three years before by the Anthony Burns case, when federal troops marched into their commonwealth to return Burns, an escaped slave then living and working in Boston, to bondage in Virginia—inspiring protests and lethal violence on his behalf. To the west, Kansas was bloodied by fighting between pro- and antislavery elements; to the south, politicians had begun defending slavery not as a necessary evil but as a positive ideal.

As an historian Dr. Appelbaum certainly knows better than I that Emerson, Longfellow, and the other founders of the Atlantic considered slavery the greatest moral challenge faced by the still-young United States. They had opposed the Mexican War and Manifest Destiny. Emerson had compared the annexation of Mexico’s possessions north of the Rio Grande to taking arsenic. They favored independence and self-reliance over the amassing of riches. They believed in women’s suffrage and distinctive contributions to society made by men and women based on biology.

Leaping forward 150 years what would those founders think about the issues of today? I think they would have found the pervasive state and, particularly, the welfare state with its assumption of permanent clienthood horrifying. I believe they would have opposed our wars of foreign adventurism from the Gulf War through the present war in Afghanistan and drone wars. I think that they would believe that we had lost our way.

What would be the “American idea” today? Is there such a thing? Can there by? I find the notion that it is to be found in the party platform of either of our political platforms incredible.

We’re ignoring the genuinely big issues—the role of the individual in society, the role of corporations, the role of the state, the role of the United States in the world—lost in the weeds.