Testing the National Covenant: Fears and Appetites in American Politics

Chapter 5: WE THE PEOPLE: A Contract or a Covenant?

81 5 WE THE PEOPLE A Contract or a Covenant? There are at least four ways to understand the question of the identity of a people that bear on the American scene: unnatural, natural , contractual, and covenantal. Only the last two figure centrally in this chapter. By unnatural I have in mind an identity imposed upon a people chiefly through violence.The dominating power governs unnaturally in the sense that it rules without the consent of the people and with little attention either to their prior identity or to their current wellbeing . One thinks inevitably of some myth like the rape of Europa or similar stories of conquest the world over. Such a disaster befell not the settlers in America but rather the Native Americans, whom the settlers and their government humiliated, drove from their natural habitats, and violated with broken treaties and promises. Traditionally in Western history the concept of a natural identity highlights those natural structures that humans seem to share with other creatures—organic, hierarchical, and perhaps patriarchical— which justify aristocratic and/or monarchical orderings of political society. Secular critics argue that this derivation of identity re- flected a conservative Catholic and European politics that Americans were eager to shed. However, Catholic theorists have also drawn on the tradition of natural law to highlight those properties and goals humans share by nature that distinguish them from other species. This particular emphasis on natural law leads to an understanding of human nature that transcends any particular identities based on nation, race, gender, class, culture, or custom. It also provides a possible basis for establishing, repairing, moderating, and improving relations between various peoples and national groups. Whatever the potential benefits of this universalism on the American scene, Roman Catholics, its eventual and chief religious bearers, were not sufficiently numerous or influential at the time of the nation’s founding to shape the country’s sense of itself. Further, the actual circumstances at the time of the founding made it dif- ficult to identify a common nature that underlies and overpowers particular, discrete ethnic identities. The first motto impressed on the great seal of the United States—e pluribus unum—bluntly af- firms America to be an original plurality. Out of that plurality a unity came into being through some kind of agreement between parties—“from the many, one.” In this respect the eventual United States of America differs from its British and European counterparts.Long before Germany,France, and Great Britain were nations, they were roughly identifiable peoples . Governments grew more or less organically out of what each already was. Identity was natural, not something conceived or fabricated out of natures antecedently multiple. However, immigrants landing in the New World carried with them differing ethnic, cultural , and linguistic identities.They could not draw on an antecedent identity for being an American. Except by conquest, that identity could emerge only through some kind of choice or promissory event. Two alternatives therefore lay open for interpreting the promissory event in and through which the nation came into being: contractual or covenantal. A contractualist account of American identity emphasizes the importance of choice, pure and simple, in creating a unity that was not there before. Consider again the motto e pluribus unum, a phrase that posits an original plurality. In the midst of that plurality a gathering of men in constitutional convention drew up a contract that they felt might satisfy the multiple but perhaps overlapping interests of each. Such an agreement would project the country toward a unity—e pluribus unum. So conceived, in the words of the social ethicist Charles Matthewes, “the United States is not a fact, a given reality; it is a destiny, an ideal, a dare, a mission, a matter of goals and ideals.”1 The phrase e pluribus unum emphasizes America as a 82 Chapter 5 project, a construction out of materials hitherto and perhaps continuingly multiple. Unity (the indispensable condition of identity) results from that construction. National unity issues from a choice. (In a sense the “many,” the diverse groups of which Americans were composed, underwent and endured a kind of preparation for this choice. In coming here each group separated itself [or was forcibly separated] from a particular past, often called the “old country,” which might be remembered fondly but could not, by itself, constitute the new world into which they entered.) The new world was a construction...