Is the United States an "Idea-State"?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The American presidential election is now in full gear, with the Republican national convention having opened in Tampa on Aug. 28, and the Democrats meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina Sept. 3.

Both parties will debate, among other things, what the United States should look like in coming years.

The citizens of very few nations examine their “essence” in the way Americans do.

Michael Lind, author of The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, has noted that many American theorists posit a view of the United States as not a nation-state but an idea-state, based on the philosophy of liberal democracy in the abstract. There are no American people as such, but rather an American idea.

The American struggle for independence would create a different kind of nation. Declared the radical pamphleteer Tom Paine in his call to arms, Common Sense, in 1776: “We have it in our power to build the world over again.”

It was the founding ideas of the American Revolution -- human equality, natural rights, civil liberty, democracy, and constitutional government – that would make people Americans. “American-ness,” in this view, is less membership in a national community than a belief in a secular political faith -- the religion of democracy.

For such thinkers, the country is a post-national idea-state (as opposed to a multicultural federation of ethnic groups, the view on the left.) It is defined only partially by language and culture, and not at all by race or religion.

As the journalist Cokie Roberts has stated, “We have nothing binding us together as a nation -- no common ethnicity, history, religion, or even language -- except the Constitution and the institutions it created.”

This has led to the idea of “American exceptionalism” -- the belief that the U.S. is not only different from other countries but superior in morality and institutions. It also gave rise to the expansionist notion of “Manifest Destiny.”

The historian Paul Johnson has defined the U.S. as “a unity, driven by agreed assumptions, accepting a common morality and moral aims, and able therefore to marshal and deploy its forces with stunning effect.”

For American exceptionalists, politics since the 1776 Declaration of Independence has been the gradual, sometimes painful, working out of the ideas of the Founders. There has been only one constitution since 1789, the dominant parties have been in place since the 1850s, and even the state boundaries have remained fixed.

This formal constitutional and political continuity of course has disguised the many political upheavals -- often violent -- in American life, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Revolution.

But the powerful set of ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution has served as ideological glue and unifying principle for the people of the United States.