Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America

4. Americanism: The Question of Community in Politics

105 4 Americanism THE QUESTION OF COMMUNITY IN POLITICS I write here in a synoptic way, summarizing themes addressed more fully in the previous three chapters for the purpose of concisely clarifying the meaning of Americanism. Let me open with the words on the subject from a representative expert, Theodore Roosevelt, who said the following just 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)1 I shall suggest that it is, indeed, Americanism that best symbolizes who we are and shall understand that term as designating the “common sense” of the country’s founding generation—its homonoia (likemindedness ) 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 eighteenth 1. First published in The Forum (April 1894) and reprinted in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (National Edition), 20 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 13:15. Citation kindly provided by Professor Gregory Russell. 106 REPUBLICANISM, RELIGION, AND THE SOUL OF AMERICA century.2 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 universalism of Americanism was an element from the beginning and constitutes part of American exceptionalism. As one scholar explains matters: The self-interpretation of American society was correctly covered by the expression Americanism. It functions as the instrument of the self-understanding of a national universe; it also, however, takes the stage with a universal claim and constructs a cosmos that encompasses God, the world, man, society, and history in the American [mode]. The word Americanism originally referred to transatlantic neologisms but was used as early as the era of the Founding Fathers as a symbol for an American interpretation of order. . . . In this context Americanism means . . . awareness of a specific American mode of existence.3 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 selfanointed “elites” at home and abroad who readily enlighten and denigrate us at every waking moment on every conceivable subject. We remember that 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 2. For the usage of the term Americanism by Jefferson (in 1797) and Adams (in 1805) and its general meaning at the time of the founding, see the discussion in Sandoz , GOL, 35–40, esp. 38n30. 3. Jürgen Gebhardt, Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal SelfInterpretation in the American Republic, trans. Ruth Hein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 229–30. Americanism 107 the same religion, attached to the same principles of government” (Federalist No. 2). Tocqueville 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.”4 Not to be thought merely old-hat ideas, Samuel Huntington in 2004 challenged Americans to “recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions, and values that . . . have been the source of...