As a professor who often teaches the American founding and the politics that event created, I sometimes have to convince students that what is truly unique about America are the ideas that helped create our country. This is harder to do than I imagined it would be when I started teaching. The problem is that these days, people — across both political parties — really want to focus on other things. Who counts as American? Is our country sufficiently good? Why isn’t the government doing what I want it to do? These are the kind of questions that often come up in class, because these are the kind of questions that our party leaders ask these days.
We live in a post-liberal world (by which I do not mean the progressive ideology of the political left). This is a world where the victories of basic, simple protections of rights through things like elections, juries, bills of rights and all of the other fruits of the American Founding guard against government oppression. Political thinkers have long called this group of ideas “liberalism,” and it is that set of ideas that is both vital but also increasingly old-fashioned in the eyes of our party leaders.
It is true that America is more than any idea or set of ideas. It is a people, a collection of groups that band together to live as best they can. They serve one another, defend this land and generally try to build as good a society as possible. But this part of America is not truly unique. You can find such behavior in the mountains of central Asia, on the plains of Africa, or in the cities of Europe — among many other places. Self-dealing and corruption may be part of the human condition, but so are generosity and sympathy. Humans are complicated, but they are complicated wherever they live.
What is truly unique about America is not its military, or its economic prosperity or even its acts of service (great though all of those things are). America is unique because of the set of ideas birthed between 1765 and 1800. So I try to get my students to understand this uniqueness: that everyone is created equal, that governments have to protect the rights of everyone and that it is our duty to change those governments that fail these tests. The ideas may be older than America (certainly the Englishman John Locke needs more than a footnote when referencing these concepts), but these ideas are America’s great gift to the world.
It is hard to look at the last few years and not wonder why so many of our party leaders seem to forget or simply slide past these ideas. Barack Obama was quick to dismiss “American exceptionalism” early in his presidency when he said that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” but at least President Obama could also say in a speech that he believed in the importance of the rule of law and our “willingness to affirm” it “through our actions."
Sadly, Obama’s own party is often quick to downplay the American founding and the gifts that it brought Americans and the world. Too often preferring a 1619-style narrative about what is wrong with America, the political left misses what is truly radical and amazing about America and the ideas that create it. But this weekend, the left’s post-liberalism will not be on display so much as that of the political right.
There is nothing wrong with honoring servicemen and women. Sacrifice for America is part of what makes America great, and failing to recognize those men and women is worse than negligence — it is a civic sin. But the best reason to honor them must be to honor the ideas they pledge to protect. And it is hard to see how this weekend’s military parade is advancing that cause. It looks more like a tribute to power than a celebration of America’s unique political ideas.
Abraham Lincoln clearly understood how to marry what was both wonderful about the American people with the truly unique American ideas.
He probably saw more sacrifice than most Americans (perhaps ever), and it weighed on him (just look at pictures of how he ages across the Civil War). But Lincoln never forgot the importance of ideas to America. He knew that whatever other failings Thomas Jefferson had (many failings, actually), that Jefferson had “the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” The idea of equality and government protecting people’s rights seems old-fashioned now, and we clearly take it for granted. Just listen the next time someone talks about our government from a document over 250 years old, and so forth. But Lincoln knew better than most that we must not take these things for granted.
He reminded us (on a hillside military cemetery in Pennsylvania) that living Americans should “take increased devotion” to the “cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” And those Union soldiers should not be honored simply because they were soldiers (every country in the world has soldiers). They should be honored for protecting the idea of a “new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
If you want to celebrate what is truly American, tanks, or protests or even good arguments simply are not what you should look for. Lots of places have all of these things — worthy and useful in the right context, harmful upon occasion. What is truly American and something that should be celebrated often — particularly on the 4th of July (the Declaration of Independence) and the 17th of September (the Constitution) — is the commitment to preserve government of the people, the protection of the rights of those people, and the institutions necessary to carry all of that out.
We really ought to find some political leaders who know what is truly unique about America.