Ellis Sandoz
Eric Voegelin Institute, Louisiana State University

Americanism: The Question of Community in Politics

National Meeting of The Philadelphia Society
What Is An American?
April 30, 2005
Miami, Florida

Copyright © Ellis Sandoz 2005
All Rights Reserved
Convention draft not to be quoted without specific permission.
esandoz@lsu.edu

          Many kinds of answers might be given the topic assigned to this panel–“Culture and Creed in the Formation of Americans”  All of them would have inadequacies because they would be partial and selective.  My colleagues and I will spend the next hour offering our perspectives on the subject by saying what each of us thinks most urgently can briefly be said to clarify it, and then open the discussion to our distinguished audience to correct our mistakes and deficiencies and to fill in the gaps. 

            Let me begin with the words on the subject from an acknowledged expert, Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote this a bit over a century ago:

There is one quality which we must bring to the solution of every problem,- that is, an intense and fervid Americanism. We shall never be successful over the dangers that confront us; we shall never achieve true greatness, nor reach the lofty ideal which the founders and preservers of our mighty Federal Republic have set before us, unless we are Americans in heart and soul, in spirit and purpose, keenly alive to the responsibility implied in the very name of American, and proud beyond measure of the glorious privilege of bearing it. (1894)^[i]

            I shall suggest that it is, indeed, Americanism that most concisely symbolizes who we are and shall understand that term as designating the “common sense” of the country’s Founding generation–its homonoia (like-mindedness) in Aristotle’s usage, or senso commune in Vico’s terminology.  This is the way Thomas Jefferson and John Adams seem to have understood the term when they coined it at the end of the 18^th century.  This understanding therefore appeals both to the old and new science of politics as denoting a complex matter of fundamental importance.  Once the meaning has been clarified a bit, I shall try by implication at least to indicate how to meet some of the challenges we face in preserving and defending the convictions and the way of life historically built on Americanism.  In this as in so much else Plato showed the way in the Laws when he characterized the process of preserving a just regime as mache athanatos (an undying struggle), a process our American forebears translated by the defiant phrase: “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

            The heart of the matter, and its most delicate aspect, is to connect Americanism with the biblical faith of Americans as the chief source of its strength and enduring resilience– and of its frequent arousal of anti-American sentiments from ideologues of every stripe, those self-anointed “elites” at home and abroad who readily  enlighten and denigrate us at every waking moment on every conceivable subject.  Burke identified the basis of the American consensus in the dissenting branch of Protestantism. Publius identified Providence’s gift of “one united people” “speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government”(Federalist No. 2). Tocqueville (who never lies)  stressed one must never forget that religion gave birth to America, and that American Christianity has kept a strong hold over the minds of the people, not merely as a philosophy examined and accepted, but as “an established and irresistible fact which no one seeks to attack or defend.”^[ii]   Not to be thought merely old-hat ideas, Samuel Huntington just last year challenged Americans to “recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions, and values that... have been the source of their liberty, unity, power, prosperity, and moral leadership as a force for good in the world.”^[iii]  He forecast that, unlike the 20^th which was defined by contending ideologies, the 21^st will be a century  marked by the “revenge of God” (prematurely certified dead, in fact murdered, by 19^th century luminaries), i.e. by the resurgence of religions, with culture and ethnicity replacing ideology as the central terms of reference.^[iv]   Anglo-America was a Bible-based culture for 300 years, Trevelyan observed, finding this stupendous religious movement unlike anything in the annals since St. Augustine.     

            What are the consequences for Americanism?  A great many of which I mention only two here: first,  a theory of human being as created imago Dei, each person imperfect and sinful, yet graced with the defining unique capacity of communion with his Creator as this is experientially apperceived in the New Birth: an inward experience and assurance  of election, a process of salvation that runs from conversion and justification, toward sanctification in imitation of Christ–a spiritual movement of maturation that runs from “ruin to recovery” of the divine image powerfully argued, for instance, in the soteriology of Isaac Watts and John Wesley during the 18^th century revival we call the Great Awakening.  Second, there is a pervasive understanding of the course of human events as Providentially guided, even as it is effected by human agents, i.e., by individuals exercising dominion through reason and volition over the creation as citizens no less than as pilgrims living in collaborative faith-grace partnership with God.  In both respects the In-between reality of time and history is consciously reaffirmed, vitally experienced as tensionally structured by the competing pulls of worldly immanent and transcendent divine reality. 

            Thus, Lincoln’s “almost chosen people” more often than not implies humility rather than hubris, as it has played out in American public affairs.  Jingoism and imperialism are excesses, deformations–even tinging current policy debates–of this “choseness,” rather than optimal expressions of it. The sentiment of feeling chosen^[v]  is an expression of trembling assurance,  but also one of a constant supplication for divine favor akin to that symbolized in the parable of the Prodigal Son who rejects, strays, and returns seeking mercy in a dynamic of faith experienced in rebellious apostasy, repentance, forgiveness, and renewed communion familiar in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament a well as in the Gospels (cf. Luke 15 with its echo of Psalm 51.)  The keen awareness of this dynamic in the consciousness of the American community at the time of the Founding is reflected in many sources, but perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in the sixteen or more resolutions of the Continental Congress asking for national days of prayer, humiliation, repentance, and thanksgiving at various points during the Revolution–and intermittently proclaimed thereafter in our history as well. (Cf. my A Government of Laws, chap. 5).   Such a day was proclaimed, it may be recalled, as the very first act of President George W. Bush’s presidency in January 2001.

            The Declaration of Independence is a primary text for any understanding of Americanism and a concise, creedal statement of its meaning.  But to be rightly understood it must be placed in the Christian context just limned. The evocation of transcendent divine Being in the Creator-creaturely relationship and the sense of Providential governance of human affairs beyond any sectarian divisions are authoritatively communicated therein, as is also an anthropology hinting of man as imago Dei and thereby indelibly stamped with Liberty, expressed  in the rhetorical mode of inalienable rights reflective of the Creator’s salient attributes.  The “Lockean” liberal political theory therein advanced thus ontologically foots on this anthropology as demanding consent for legitimacy of laws and of government itself, whose powers are thus inherently limited and whose cardinal purpose is salus populi:  to serve its citizenry and not they it.  The Declaration expressed the Whig consensus of Americans at the time, Jefferson later claimed.

            Jefferson and Adams meant all of this when they coined the term Americanism as early as 1797.  But they also meant the republicanism nurtured in Western political philosophy by the most famous writings of our civilization, from the Israelite republic of seventy Elders (Numbers 11 and Deuteronomy 16, revived by James Harrington and Tom Paine), to Aristotle’s “mixed” regime and rule of law, to Aquinas whom Lord Acton  thought the “first Whig,” to the Commonwealthmen of the English 17^th century, especially John Milton and Algernon Sidney whose language is soaked in biblical and classical understanding.  From Richard Hooker by way of Locke their Americanism embraced the great principle that “Laws they are not which public approbation hath not made so,” an insistence that gave the American Revolution its motto, if it had one.  The Constitution and laws of the land were intended, when time came, to inculcate republican virtues and customs into the minds and hearts of the citizenry and make them the habitual educational foundation of civic consciousness, thereby overtime forming uniquely American character.   We may also mention that James Madison, as part of his own education, stayed on an extra term at the College of New Jersey to study Hebrew with John Witherspoon, so as to read the Old Testament in the original as he did the New Testament in koine Greek.  This was the golden age of the classics in America, and the educated generation knew the Bible inside out and the Greek and Latin (especially “Tully”) classics as  second nature.

            What emerges if we take the Founding moment as paradigmatic for our purposes is a body of writing and thought in which faith in divine governance in human affairs (to remember Benjamin Franklin in the Philadelphia Convention) is buoyed by a sense of history that teeters uneasily and expectantly on the edge of possible eschatological fulfillment through the Parousia, a tenuous “enthusiasm” kept in check by the obscurity of divine mysteries, one tempered by the rational watchful waiting that marks the human condition with uncertainty no less than expectancy, with the end to come like a thief in the night (Olivet discourse, esp. Matt. 24:31-46). This Scripturally grounded common sense rationality Franklin’s Poor Richard captured in the maxim: “Work as if you were to live 100 years, pray as if you were to die tomorrow.” 

            The new epoch sensed to be possibly dawning was symbolized on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States in the slogans “The year of our daring–1776" and “Novus ordo seclorum–The new Order of the Ages,” with the Eye of Providence presiding over an unfinished pyramid.  Not my will but Thine be done, the Prayer goes.  No more than any other positive human achievement might any ecumenic kingdom ever be merely man’s affair.  But like every other great truth, this  delicate matter too can be vulgarized and deformed by wilful sophistry.

            The fifth great strand of Americanism along with Bible, republicanism, so-called Lockean liberalism, and the classics is common law constitutionalism.  This tradition of law in practice, word, and experience mightily evoked the great Tree of Liberty, the ancient constitution, Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, Sir John Fortescue’s Lancastrian constitution as revived two centuries later by Sir Edward Coke, whose crabbed Institutes became the reigning textbook for America’s lawyers, as Jefferson attested.  With it came a sturdy and intricate historical jurisprudence to augment the jurisprudence of divine and Stoic natural law that played such a key role in cogently justifying departure from the realm of England.  When in old age Adams and Jefferson finally patched up their differences and wrote the great exchange of letters we have from them, Adams neatly identified the sources of homonoia or unity of mind and spirit (Americanism) that carried the day for the Good Old Cause as Whig Liberty and Christianity. He fervently affirmed (in 1813) to his old comrade of battles now long past–his fellow “Argonaut,” as he called Jefferson: “Now I will avow, that I then believed, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the existence and attributes of God, and those Principles of Liberty are as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System.”

            Such Americanism–a highly differentiated complex of vital beliefs deeply held, forming the infrastructure of rational politics, adapting and augmenting as exigency demands–has sustained the nation into the present. Perhaps it still remains alive and well in the heartland despite all social amnesia, the educational depredations of ideologues and postmodernists, and the insidious deculturation wreaked by mendacity, neglect, and blissful ignorance. It has certainly structured resolve and from time to time been strengthened in moments of crisis and national peril, by decisions to fight for what the United States took to be right and in the national interest–most lately our just wars, both hot and cold, against the great tyrannies of the 20^th century, and the present war against terrorism.   And it inspired by its potent universalism the French Revolution and both abolitionism and the civil rights revolution in this country. 

            Of course, especially by the steady affirmation as cardinal truth of man’s tension toward the abiding divine Ground beyond nature and beyond all temporal reality, it has enraged the  alienated and enlightened intellectuals who prefer their own trendy reductionist ideologies, favorite corrupting modern Gnostic variants of secularism. Such superior persons derisively sneer at the bucolic quaintness of those (including our Founders, such notable patriots as Teddy Roosevelt, and most of the rest of us) who are unable to understand–as they well do–that all things are permitted, that might is right, and that the highest being for man is man himself.  Throw in a dash of envy for material success, economic and political preeminence, and you have a recipe for being hated by voluble “elites” far and wide, at home and abroad–much to the bewilderment of ordinary folk and normal people.

            “Anti-Americanism is at base a totalizing, if not a totalitarian, vision,” one acute French observer explains, and he continues: “The peculiar blindness of fanaticism can be recognized in the way it seizes on a certain behavior of the hated object and sweepingly condemns it, only to condemn with equal fervor the opposite behavior shortly after–or even simultaneously....  According to this vision...Americans can do nothing but speak idiocies, make blunders, commit crimes; and they are answerable for all the setbacks, all the injustices and all the sufferings of the rest of humanity.”^[vi]  But that, it seems, may be a subject for another occasion.  Just a little red meat for you before I close! 

            Thank you.