What does it mean to be an American?

The question in this post title -- what does it mean to be an American? -- is something I seem to have sidled up to in a pair of recent essays for American Spectator Online. I guess a trip to Disneyland and an argument with a celebrity who offers his own snapshot of our national character can't help but raise questions about We the People of these United States, and what ties us together.

These are questions that I last thought about when Joe Carter hosted on online symposium about the roots of Americanism in 2005 (I argued at the time that it was wrong to overstate the influence of Puritanism on the American founding, because it was necessary but not sufficient, and more derivative than Puritans would admit).

Revisionist historians have parlayed dinner-table conversations about “God, Gold, and Guns” into respectable careers, but I do not think that kind of shorthand about American motivation helps anybody outside of academia find a common thread that links Theodore Roosevelt, Mia Hamm, and Chuck Yeager with Sitting Bull, Tom Petty, and Oprah Winfrey.

What Might Be American

Maybe the prime modern criterion for defining Americanism is willingness to defend the Constitution, both because of what it is as a founding document and because of what it does to enshrine the individual and collective freedoms we hold dear. That was my first thought, but it's not good enough, because in spite of the "modern" caveat and its implicit concession that the definition of "American" can change, we should remember that however they thought of themselves, our national mythology claims such men as Jefferson Davis, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse for America. When Josey Wales met Ten Bears, the Confederate and the Comanche spoke to each other as warriors, but also, I'd say, as Americans. Any attempt to highlight the essentials of our national character must include both of them.

In the early autumn of 2001, after the attacks of September 11 had thrown questions of identity into high relief, Romanian newspaper editor Cornel Nistorescu wrote movingly of "the heavy artillery of the American soul," describing it as a shared love for freedom that we all cleave to even more fiercely than we cling to our land, our money, or what he called our "galloping history."

Friend Bookworm has been pondering the American soul at greater depth. Like Nistorescu, Bookworm writes that the essence of America is liberty. Unlike him, she also explores the related idea that political power flows from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. This is by design rather than by ideology, although I suppose you could argue that ideology informs the handiwork of the founders.

Given an emphasis on liberty and an aversion to manipulation under any guise as pillars of our national character, it’s no surprise that Bookworm’s current essay for American Thinker is a field guide to the hazards of electing someone unschooled in those preferences to the presidency. More importantly, her essay is an eloquent synthesis of the American character as refracted through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

My own thoughts about Americanism are influenced by favorite books. Gifted writers like Mark Twain, Richard Bradford, Tom Wolfe, Edward Abbey, Tony Horwitz, John Steinbeck, Louis L’Amour, and John Kennedy Toole have all written about this country, often by looking at representative cross-sections of her people.

Apart from loudly insisting on freedom and the inherent worth of any individual (janitor or general), are there other things that Americans do or have more of than other people?

My apologies to hot dogs, apple pie, and the Coca-Cola company, but foods and drinks don't make the grade. Baseball counts, but it’s just a game, so we can’t pin much on it in this conversation. Likewise, the link between private property and “the pursuit of happiness” is too seldom talked about (John Stossel was accused of bias for trying to talk about it), but you don’t have to be rich to be American, so prosperity doesn’t matter enough to be a defining national characteristic.

Enduring faith in progress might be one of our defining national traits, even if it’s sometimes wrongheaded, or just a remnant of that spirit that sent people on perilous journeys to and through the New World back in the day.

We’ve never labored under mandatory five-year plans, so it’s not surprising that the average American is probably less jaded than the average European hostage to Marxist ideology. The progress we believe in can be technological or social or wholly imaginary, but as advertisers have long known, we do like the sound of “new and improved,” more than some other cultures (For a glimpse of “old school” power politics, read Machiavelli, or David Burge’s hilarious and profane channeling of Julius Caesar).

What Is NOT American

On the negative side of the ledger, formal class distinctions and allegiance to abstractions have to be listed as things that are un-American.

Certainly slavery as a “formal class distinction” inflamed early arguments over who could be elected to the House of Representatives, but it was even then recognized as a blot on the American character, rather than an expression of it. Anyone who doubts that need only study the Civil War, the Gettysburg Address, and the records of the Constitutional Convention to see that while the founders deferred a final judgment on slavery to future generations, they knew better than to give it a ringing endorsement that would have been at odds with their own principles. Similarly, formal sanction for snobbery requires a House of Lords. While the U.S. Senate likes to think of itself as "the world's greatest deliberative body," it does not -- cannot -- pretend to lordship, even though some long-serving senators seem to wish it did or could.

Freedom might seem to be an exception to that idea that we don’t warm to abstractions, but it’s not, at least in this country. We don’t think of freedom as an abstraction, because we’ve codified exactly what it means in the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments to the Constitution.

I had not thought it would be controversial to imply that the American dream preceded the American founding, but the most interesting criticism of my recent attempt at amateur sociology via Disneyland came from a reader who suggested that “there is no more pernicious notion than the idea that America is a ‘proposition nation,’ an idea instead of a particular place and people.” He went on to say that the idea of freedom cannot be America’s defining characteristic, because it is simply part of this country’s “overall cultural milieu.” That’s a wonderful argument that affirms the wisdom of Woody Guthrie singing “this land is your land; this land is my land.” Ultimately, however, it fails to persuade: If King George had been less high-handed with his colonies, they might not have coalesced against British tyranny, or fought for a “new birth of freedom,” with some patriots justifying their actions as part of a tradition going back to the Magna Carta, and others enthused by the prospect of throwing a wayward mother country over the side, with no thought yet of the Spanish and French settlements on the same continent that answered to mother countries of their own.

In the symposium that Joe Carter hosted five years ago, I called abortion “un-American” because it is antithetical to individual life that we at least pretend to exalt everywhere else.

It is also possible to flag atheism as un-American, not because you have to believe in God to be a good American, but because all the early talk about the rights of free people was ultimately anchored in notions of an omnipotent Creator who made “natural law.” The founders were educated men, and while they were not necessarily pious or churchgoing, even the most irascible deists and bigots among them recognized human dignity. People who study the history of ideas trace the acceptance of that idea back to medieval times and the often-prickly meeting of minds between Classical, Jewish, and Catholic thought. In other words, Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome were the big three, then Wittenburg and Geneva joined the party. Colonial thinkers in Philadelphia owed their forebears in those other cities a tremendous intellectual debt, and even those who railed against “popery” and “Romish superstition” knew it.

Closing Thoughts

Freedom and optimism seem indispensable to the American character. Hand-wringing of any kind is not (Former president Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech was un-American, and Ronald Reagan called him on that. Senator Olympia Snowe's rationale for supporting Obamacare was also un-American, but so far only alert bloggers have noticed).

I’ve said that atheism, abortion, snobbery, and allegiance to abstraction are un-American. Those negative assertions are bound to be more controversial than the positive ones, but they round out the picture. Although it is true to say that this essay and a few dollars will get you a flavored latte, trying to get a fix on the American character seems a perennially useful exercise, and more interesting than yammering about who is “extremist” and who is not (Quin Hilyer doesn't yammer, but he's fed up with the yammering, too: "The single biggest myth in American politics is that advocacy of limited government is a fringe position.")

I hope it does not sound as though I see whatever makes the American character unique among national characters as the sum of every good thing. If it were that, then America wouldn’t be home to the diverse collection of people it has, as deeply flawed as those anywhere else. Beacon of hope we may still be, but we are not the New Jerusalem, and the Christian patriots who seem to think we could be scare me.

I also do not mean to say that anyone who believes in the virtues of freedom and optimism is necessarily American. People of all nationalities may be sympathetic to American ideals; my argument is only that there are American ideals, shaped by but separate from the complexities of the American landscape.

One area where the default American character (not to say any particular American) falls short is in support for the family. Emphasis on individualism and self-reliance can crowd communitarian virtues out of the picture if we let it. We would do better to remember what mainstream Christianity does, that “as long as the natural family is recognized as prior to the creation of the state, then we may still argue that it possesses its own legitimate sphere of authority, and indeed that the state is in some sense beholden to, and subordinate to, and the artificial construct of families, and not the other way around.” That was Anthony Esolen paraphrasing Canadian political philosopher Doug Farrow, and both men make a good point.