“Yes, Yes” On Their Lips

I think that Walter Russell Mead is applying his own priors in his most recent Wall Street Journal column:

Whenever somebody tells me that America is a creedal nation, I think back to my own experience growing up in the Carolinas. Not once in my childhood or adolescence did I ever think of my American identity or anybody else’s as creedal, nor did I meet anybody who thought this way. We were Americans not because we believed a set of ideas. We felt American the way Turks feel Turkish and the French feel French.

Spoken like a true American. No, they don’t. The Turks don’t believe that a lot of the people whose 12 times great-grandfathers were born in Turkey are Turks. For the French, to be French you must speak the French language. Turkish and French identity rest on histories, languages, and ethnic traditions that are fundamentally different from the American experience. The United States has had to develop another basis for national cohesion because it is a nation of many ancestries.

When supporters of the creedal nation theory come at me brandishing copies of the Declaration, I respect their sentiments but maintain my dissent. The Declaration isn’t a set of propositions in political science issued by an academic committee. It was issued “in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies.”

That’s the challenge that faces us in a nutshell. The Declaration of Independence is an example of the American Creed not its totality. Accepting what’s in the Declaration of Independence doesn’t make you an American. Even being a citizen of the United States does not make you American. Being an American includes a substantial framework of beliefs:

• limited government
• constitutionalism
• representative institutions
• federalism
• liberty under law
• private property
• voluntary association
• civic responsibility

That’s a lot more than the Declaration of Independence.

I’ll provide an example. If to achieve your own version of the American Dream, controlling the behavior of your neighbors is essential, you might want to revisit whether you actually believe the American Creed.

We face a challenge new in our history. There are more notional Americans who are from somewhere else now that at any time in our history. America has always welcomed immigrants. But becoming American has historically required more than legal residence. It has required transferring one’s primary political loyalty from the old country to the United States. If old national quarrels remain one’s primary political identity, assimilation remains incomplete.

I suggest he watch the 1945 short The House I Live In. Its premise is simple: what makes someone American is not where his ancestors came from but whether he embraces a common civic identity. That’s much closer to what I mean by the American Creed than a mere recitation of the Declaration of Independence.