It is a commonplace among American conservatives that, at some point in the past, the way Americans understood their constitutional and cultural tradition diverged from the reality of the constitutional order established in 1787.  For the Southern Agrarians and their intellectual descendants, the great change occurred with the Civil War, which elevated “union” over the nation’s federal system and Abraham Lincoln as the national savior, thus inaugurating the new understanding of president-as-autocrat.  Others fault FDR and the New Deal, which kicked off a project in social engineering, now in its seventh decade, led by progressives who think they can tinker with human society as easily as they can with a stock portfolio.  Legal conservatives locate the transition in the decisions of the Warren Court, which weakened the rule of law and state sovereignty.  As a result, we now have a contemporary political culture in which nothing is settled unless five justices of the Supreme Court say it is so, and sometimes not even then.  Although many conservatives indulge in the game of trying to pinpoint the historical moment when the forces of ideology triumphed, less effort has been made to understand why it happened at all, and whether recovery and regeneration are possible.  Too often, conservatives have simply preferred to lament a lost past (Russell Kirk being a notable exception among traditionalists).  This has had the negative effect of persuading others—for instance, voters—that conservatives seek only to turn back the clock, which is anathema in our progressive age.  Since most Americans have no knowledge of their own history, and cannot conceive of a society not dominated by leftist dogma, this is not likely a winning strategy.

Justin Litke recognizes this difficulty: “What happens when a country’s world view is radically changed?” is the question that opens and forms the theme of his new book.  Moreover, that change occurred mostly by using the same language; we still speak of constitutionalism, of federalism, of the rule of law.  However,

The words that previously had led Americans to think of themselves in one way now lead them to think and act in thoroughly different ways. . . . What is more most citizens today cannot see the change as a change because they are unaware of the tradition as it previously existed.

This is an almost insuperable intellectual difficulty: Not only has political language changed, but we do not recognize the change, and those people self-entrusted with our political heritage have an interest in seeing that we don’t.

Litke uses the history of “American exceptionalism” to chart this deformation, and to explain how it occurred.  An assistant professor of government and political science at Belmont Abbey College, he structures his narrative around three figures: John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Beveridge, as well as the Founding Fathers.  Of these, Beveridge might be the least well known.  A senator from Indiana, he has come to be associated with American exceptionalism in its imperialistic form and is largely remembered for a speech he gave calling for the annexation of the Philippines.  Litke uses the work of Willmoore Kendall and George Carey to explain how the basic symbols of American political tradition—the Mayflower Compact, for example—cannot be understood outside their larger cultural context.  When that context shifts, those symbols take on new meaning as well.

What the “exceptional” nature of the American experiment in self-government means has been particularly drawn into the Orwellian memory hole.  Right-wingers and leftists alike have found the term useful in justifying their imperial projects, remaking America, and imposing their view of the nation on an unsuspecting public.  The left has found exceptionalism by turns irritating or empowering, depending on whether the goal is to shame middle-class Americans for their ignoble heritage or to aggrandize social-welfare policies.  The right, since the advent of neoconservatism in the 1970’s especially, has attached itself to the term as an excuse for endless wars ostensibly meant to further “the democratic idea,” which these imperialist boosters take to be the core of American society.

But the bases for both views of American exceptionalism are mistaken.  For example, as Richard Gamble has explained in an important recent book, the image of a “city on a hill,” which has done so much to foster American ambition, has been almost wholly misunderstood.  Here, Litke addresses the same problem.  That image, and the Puritan theology it expressed, has nothing to do with exceptionalism as the term is now understood.  Rather, it was employed as a means of self-reflection and self-critique, not as warrant to go forth among the nations and subdue them.  The Puritans wished to be an example to the world, under the threat of divine judgment; Americans now think of themselves as instruments of divine power, to force their example upon the countries of the world.

Abraham Lincoln is the hinge upon which the great swing was made.  The Illinois politician remains controversial because through his speeches Lincoln inaugurated a new understanding of America and her history.  Litke analyzes Lincoln’s major speeches, in particular the Gettysburg Address, with sophistication.  Too often, conservative attacks on Lincoln have been tinged with Lost Cause-ism, which has made their reception by other conservatives more difficult with each passing year, in part because of the very forgetfulness Lincoln himself has caused.  Litke explains clearly how Lincoln filled the old language of republican government with new meaning.  For example, here is Litke on the Gettysburg Address:

Lincoln gives the United States a new origin in 1776—rather than in the gradual development from a centuries-long tradition of self-government and self-understanding—and with this comes a mission.  The country, previously dedicated only to its own perpetuity, is now set on a course for the realization of a state of universal equality. . . . Where before the union was concerned only with its own order, it is now concerned with the concrete realization of an abstract idea.

That would have been enough to dilute the traditional understanding of American republicanism, but Lincoln goes further, as Litke explains.  The Founding Fathers believed that the Constitution began, in some ways, a new experiment in ordered self-government, but Lincoln makes the Civil War a crucial test of whether such a nation, dedicated to the “proposition that all men are created equal,” can “long endure.”  Thus, Lincoln’s nation is an idea (realizable around the globe) that is being put to the test, while that of the founders is an experiment based on (in the words of Federalist 1) “reflection and choice” that can preserve some measure of liberty and equality.  We may prefer one to the other, but we must at least admit that they are not the same thing, even though the same language is used to describe them.

It would have been worthwhile for Litke to contextualize Lincoln and his oratory further.  Lincoln possessed a certain genius, but Litke acknowledged that he was not alone.  “Lincoln has not done this without the consent of the American people—he persuades them to adopt his view.”  Thus, there must have been a reason audiences were so receptive to this new understanding of their country.  Was it the years of bloodshed, or were broader and deeper intellectual currents making the audience receptive to the notion of belonging to a “proposition nation”?  This is an important question, because when Albert Beveridge appears only 30 years later he delivers a famous speech justifying the American occupation of the Philippines by recourse to American exceptionalism in a new form.  In those three decades Lincoln’s rhetoric has become the new prism through which to view the Constitution.  The links between the old order and the new have been severed.

Beveridge reverses the tropes of self-government and adds to them racism and Protestant triumphalism.  Whereas in the earlier understanding republican self-government was a treasure of the British political tradition to be husbanded and zealously guarded, in Beveridge’s mind it becomes an excuse for colonization; “barbarous” peoples need to be trained to self-government under American tutelage.  It is impossible not to hear the echoes of such arguments in contemporary justifications for endless occupations of the nations of the Middle East and elsewhere.  Other politicians, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, pressed the notion of America’s nearly divine mission to democratize the world.  The Puritan city on a hill had been changed to a garrison post sending out its troops, and we are living with the consequences of this today.

Litke is not particularly optimistic that the older tradition of self-government is fully retrievable, suggesting that the nation would require generations to recover a proper understanding of itself.  Even that may be overly generous as, given the history he describes, it is unclear whether a majority of the American people even wish to try to regain their lost tradition.  Narcotized by big government and mass entertainment, they appear to have little interest in making dead symbols live again.

 

[Twilight of the Republic: Empire and Exceptionalism in the American Political Tradition, by Justin B. Litke (University Press of Kansas) 213 pp., $50.00]