The Devils We Know

Us and Them in America's Raucous Political Culture

James A. Morone

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700621422, 9780700620104
• eBook ISBN: 9780700621798
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is there an American culture? Certainly, says James Morone. Americans are fighting over it now. They have been fighting over it since the first Puritan stepped ashore. Americans hate government (no national health insurance!) and call for more of it (lock ‘em up!). They prize democracy (power to the people) and scramble to restrict it (the electoral college in the 21st century?). They celebrate opportunity—but only for some (don’t let those people in!). Americans proclaim liberty then wrestle over which kind—positive (freedom from want) or negative (no new taxes!)?

In this volume Morone offers his own answer to the conundrum of American political culture: It is a perpetual work in progress. Immigrants arrive, excluded groups demand power, and each generation injects new ethnicities, races, religions, ideas, foods, entertainments, sins, and body types into the national mix. The challengers—the devils we know—keep inventing new answers to the nation’s fundamental question: Who are we?

Each essay in The Devils We Know takes up a different aspect of the creative conflicts that shape America. Ranging from Huck Finn to Obamacare, Morone explores the ways in which culture interacts with other forces—most notably the rules and organizations that channel collective choices. The battle to define the nation’s political culture spills over into every area of American life, but three are especially important: democracy, economics, and morals — each, in turn, complicated by race, race, race. Written over 25 years, these essays constitute a closely observed and deeply thoughtful vision of what America is—its ideas, images, rules, institutions, and culture clashes. Together, they explain just why America is the way it is. And what it might become.

PART I

Is There an American Political Culture?

Culture is simply the ensemble of stories we tell about ourselves.

—Clifford Geertz

1

Is There an American Political Culture?

Culture is elusive. Analyzing it, wrote one historian, is a bit like nailing jelly to a post. But people know it when they see it. Germans talk about a “culture of solidarity”—the basis for a welfare state that is more than a century old. The French profess a faith in egalité and fraternité. Citizens of Thailand participate in elaborate networks of deference and patronage. And at least some Americans celebrate what they see as a heritage of rugged individualism. Every people operate with a culture: shared values, expectations, aspirations, and norms that grow out of history and myth.

There are many formal definitions. E. B. Taylor, the founder of social anthropology, put it this way in 1871: “Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by [people] as member[s] of society.” Margaret Mead boiled all that down to a simple phrase: the “shared, learned behavior of a society.” David Greenstone gave it a more political twist: “the framework of norms, symbols, assumptions, and expectations with which a people make sense of their experiences and formulate appropriate courses of action.” My favorite definition—the one I use—was coined by Clifford Geertz when he was an anthropologist at Princeton University: “Culture is simply the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”¹

In the United States, the question of culture has always been entangled in the idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States, uniquely, broke free from the bonds of culture, chance, and history. The Federalist Papers make the point right from the start: “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country . . . to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” The established “framework of norms, symbols, assumptions, and expectations,” as Greenstone put it, would not bind this new nation. Americans would found their new regime on reflection and reason.²

Almost a half century later, Alexis de Tocqueville demurred. The United States could never burst free from its culture. “There is no country where the law can foresee everything,” he wrote, “or where institutions should take the place of . . . mores.” He went on to define mores as “the habits of the heart . . . the sum of ideas that shape mental habits . . . the whole moral and intellectual state of a people.” These, concluded Tocqueville, are what undergird a nation’s political institutions and shape its political behavior. A long list of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers explored Americans and their mores—Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (in 1782), Moreau de St. Mercy (1798), Frances Trollope (1832, whose last chapter explained why she did not like Americans), Charles Dickens (1842), and many more. But Tocqueville remains the best known. His Democracy in America forms the most important foundation for contemporary studies in American political culture—although almost every word is challenged by one reader or another.³

Three questions dominate debates about the role of culture in American politics today. Does a distinctive American culture really exist? If so, what does it look like? And exactly how—and how much—does political culture influence politics?

Does a Distinctive American Culture Exist?

A generation ago, most social scientists thought so. They described a national consensus stretching back to the American founding. Important books bore titles such as Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind (published in 1950), Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948), or Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans (1965).⁴ American values and attitudes—running deeper than ideology or political party—were said to explain why the United States appeared inured to the siren calls of Marxism, communism, or socialism.⁵ The dominant school of thought, in both political science and history, came to be known as the consensus school: Americans may engage in spirited politics, but they agree about their deepest values. Critics occasionally damned the cultural consensus for its suffocating homogeneity, but few questioned its existence or challenged its content.

Today, agreement over a shared American culture has vanished. Some scholars insist that the traditional American culture is still going strong. Americans, they argue, remain deeply committed to a core set of values—liberty, political rights, equal opportunity, democracy, and a belief in limited government. These add up to a great American creed, originally set down in the Declaration of Independence. Of course, Americans have never fully lived up to their high-flying ideals, but each generation has fought to close the gap between our quotidian life and our creedal aspirations. Understanding American politics—its great debates, its reform moments, what makes it exceptional—means understanding the formidable American creed.⁶

Others mournfully view the American creed as a relic of the past. Centrifugal forces press on our society and bode serious trouble for the grand old culture. Today, the United States “belittles unum and glorifies pluribus,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Forty million people in the United States (or about one in eight) were born abroad. They cling to foreign values and resist the purifying fire of America’s melting pot. Ethnic militancy, concluded Schlesinger, “nourishes prejudices, magnifies differences and stirs antagonisms.” Proponents of this view fret that a fierce identity politics challenges traditional American culture. Samuel Huntington wrote one of the seminal (highly celebratory) descriptions of the creed in 1981; some twenty years later, he saw it slipping away. The American creed, he cautioned, “is unlikely to retain its salience if Americans abandon the Anglo-Protestant culture in which it has been rooted.” The old values, continued Huntington, will not survive in a multicultural America. Scholars from this perspective all ask variations of the same question: “Will the center hold?” as Schlesinger put it. “Or will the melting pot give way to the tower of Babel?”⁷

A third view cheers the diversity. Proponents of this perspective reject the traditional accounts of American political culture. Images of consensus, they argue, chronicled the perspective of wealth and power while ignoring alternative voices. They jeer the idea that the United States sprang from an “Anglo-Protestant culture.” Perhaps the most popular exhibit in the brief against the old school is the fear expressed by a member of the old guard in the 1962 presidential address of the American Historical Association. Carl Birdenbaugh of Brown University warned his colleagues of the gathering storm. Once upon a time, he argued, scholars were men who shared a common culture. Now, he lamented, historians are increasingly “products of lower middle class or foreign origins [not to mention women], and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstruction. They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past.”⁸ “Our” past? Birdenbaugh’s fears proved prophetic. Outsiders no longer, a new generation of scholars began to read the nation differently. That cultural consensus celebrated by men like Birdenbaugh had been nothing more than the perspective of the privileged. A new generation of scholars began to find American culture in a rich amalgamation of immigrant voices, oppressed people’s blues, and songs from the alleys. This perspective celebrates the American “Babel” as the welcome sound of diversity. Cultural pluralism, from this perspective, is nothing less than the mainspring of national renewal.⁹

Which view is right? Did Americans ever share a political culture? If they had it, did they lose it? If they lost it, should they feel distressed or liberated?

My answer is simple. Yes, the United States had—and has—a vibrant political culture. But in contrast to the traditional picture of culture as a static thing, American culture is almost constantly contested and continuously evolving. Each generation of immigrants brings new perspectives; so do marginal groups struggling for legitimacy. African Americans insist that the black experience lies at the heart of the American experience—challenging past generations, which shrugged aside slavery as, in Frederick Jackson Turner’s phrase, a mere “incident.”¹⁰ Race is just the first omission on a long list (an error, incidentally, that Tocqueville did not fall into; the longest chapter in Democracy in America is a deeply pessimistic inventory of “The Three Races That Inhabit the United States”). Liminal groups of every sort remake American culture as they struggle for legitimacy. The uproar over the national story reminds us that there is nothing inevitable or permanent about the ideas and groups that win a hearing and become part of the mainstream. Or those that lose and fall to the margins. The stories we tell ourselves—and the lessons we draw from them—keep changing.

Ironically, a notorious jeremiad got it just about right. In a speech to the Republican National Convention of 1992, Patrick Buchanan rattled the mainstream with his ferocious declaration: “We are . . . in a culture war . . . for the soul of America.”¹¹ He failed to add that the war has waxed and waned for more than 300 years. What is most distinctive and timeless about American political culture is not equality (as Tocqueville thought) or an Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethos (Huntington) or individual rights (Seymour Martin Lipset) or racial backlash (W. E. B. Du Bois) or the rise of pan-Latino culture or the irresistible spread of Starbucks but rather the lively debate about all these topics and many more. They add up to a mighty contest about what it means to be American. The national culture is—and always was—a brawling, complicated work in progress.

What Does American Political Culture Look Like?

American culture—perhaps every national culture—is rooted in a series of great national myths. Each resonates with at least some of the population some of the time. Each carries its own set of lessons. The central question is always the same: how do the stories add up? What do they tell Americans about America? In this section, I explore four major cultural traditions: individualism, community, the ascriptive tradition, and morality. They should be read as overlapping. They all operate simultaneously, despite the manifest contradictions between them. As historian Michael Kammen put it, Americans are the people of paradox.¹²

INDIVIDUALISM: THE LIBERAL TRADITION

Start with the classic vision of American political culture, the one that they all agreed on in the 1950s. Alexis de Tocqueville set the foundation. “It seems to me that I can see the entire destiny of America contained in the first Puritan[s] who landed on these shores.” What they found when they stepped ashore was a vast, unpopulated land. In contrast to the neighbors they left behind in Europe, those early Americans did not face powerful political or economic elites. Here, there were no rigid social classes or repressive political authorities. Instead, as Tocqueville put it, “Americans . . . were born equal instead of becoming so.”¹³ White men faced extraordinary opportunities. The land and its riches awaited them. Any white man could become a success—all it took was a little capital and a lot of work. (Both Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, took a far more gloomy view when it came to women or people of color.)¹⁴

In this context, continued the famous American legend, the early settlers soon became unabashed individualists. After all, if success and failure lay in every individual’s own hands, there would be no need for government assistance or collective action. European serfs had to band together to fight for political rights and economic mobility. But Americans were free from the start.

Louis Hartz developed the most important twentieth-century variation of this argument. He began with Tocqueville’s insight that Americans were “born equal”—he quoted it at the start of the first six chapters—and concluded that the “absence of clerical and feudal oppressions” left Americans without a revolutionary or a reactionary tradition. In Europe, all mobility was, by necessity, class mobility. In contrast, Americans rose (or fell) on their own merits and hard work. The result, wrote Hartz, was a fierce, irrational, Lockean liberalism; its defining feature became a deep—a creedal—aversion to socialism, redistribution of wealth, or every expansion of government. Government, indeed collective action of any sort, only undermined the great test of personal virtue: how much money you make in the free market. Even the American democrat quailed like Hamlet, wrote Hartz, at the prospect of taking wealth from the wealthy—even if the action was in his or her own self-interest.¹⁵

Hartz’s theory has come in for a great deal of criticism. It traces all American thought to a simple (and somewhat dubious) cause: the absence of feudal oppression in America. It entirely ignores the great American binaries of race and gender. It cannot explain how and why the national government grew from 200 gentlemen in 1800 to 2.6 million civil servants today. To be sure, these are all serious flaws in the Hartzian story. And yet, the theory has an almost uncanny predictive power. From the red scare while Hartz was writing to the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Who Are We?
• Part I: Is There an American Political Culture?
• Part II: Wealth and Power
• Part III: Morals and Politics
• Part IV: Us and Them in Action
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover