Is America a Propositional Nation?

On Defining Our Political and Cultural Inheritance

When people claim that America was not founded as a “propositional nation” they usually have in mind statements like this Tweet from former President Barack Obama: 

The Fourth of July is about celebrating the big, bold, inclusive experiment that is our American democracy. And it has always been an experiment. Our democracy has never been guaranteed, which means we can’t take it for granted. We need to keep fighting for it, keep improving it, and keep making sure it reflects the better angels of our nature instead of the worst. That, more than anything, is what America is all about.

In this way of thinking, America is all about “inclusive democracy,” by which progressives mean tolerating anything and everything—except what made America great to begin with. Many other anachronistic ideas are routinely put forward today as “what defines America.”

Those who value what America was at its founding understandably recoil from such progressive platitudes. One way some do so is by insisting that America is not a propositional nation. There is truth in this, but it is not a wholly sufficient answer to modern distortions of what defines America.

Part of the argument for America not being a propositional nation is that it also must be understood as a unique people in a unique place with a unique cultural inheritance. This is similar to arguments Roger Scruton made over the years about nationality. For example, in his book How To Be A Conservative (pp. 24-25) he writes:

Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile. The oikos is the place that is not just mine and yours but ours.

America, in this way of thinking, is more than just a geographical boundary or services provider; it is also more than simply, as Yoram Hazony puts it in his critique of modern progressivism (Conservatism, p. 45), “a ‘creedal nation’ bound by nothing other than reason and consent . . . .” “A civilization,” like America’s, “is a social entity that manifests religious, political, legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge” (Roger Scruton, Culture Counts, p. 2). If that civilization is good, it should be preserved.

There is much to commend this thesis. It is only more recently that Americans have come to define themselves primarily in terms of a shared “creedal” statement, whether that be adherence to a progressive conception of liberal democracy, multicultural openness, or whatever. As the political science professor Samuel Goldman puts it in After Nationalism (p. 4), his defense of political liberalism: “[i]n the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century . . . a creed of equal rights became something like our official philosophy.” Many of those who reject the notion that America is a propositional nation are reacting to this creedal understanding of America’s founding and history.

However, as I see it, there is a difficulty in pushing the claim that America is not a propositional nation too far. Maybe a better way to put it would be to say that while America, at least according to the constitutional order of the American founding, should not be defined exclusively in propositional terms, it cannot be defined without recourse to propositions either. Or to put it in yet another way: certain core ideas and practices are indispensable to what America once was, and should continue to be today.

What are those ideas and practices? Hazony (Conservatism, p. 48) sums up some of the most important in this list:

The English inheritance includes a long list of constitutional procedures and legal concepts, including the unitary executive power resting with the king; the bicameral legislature; the taxation initiative vested in the lower house of the legislature; the executive veto and the pardoning power; the procedure of impeachment; due process of law; the jury trial; the right to free speech, to bear arms, and to be immune from unreasonable search and the quartering of solders; and so forth.

Or, as Hazony continues (p. 48): “At least sixteen of the twenty-one sections making up the first four articles of the Constitution, as well as much of the first eight amendments to the Constitution, implicitly refer to English sources.”

As Russell Kirk puts it in The Roots of American Order (pp. 331-32), the American political order and inheritance:

grew ‘organically’ in colonial times, out of the practical social experience of the colonial people, who adapted British political institutions to their American circumstances. The colonial leaders did not design their society upon any abstract plan; few of them were utopians. Beginning with British example and precedent, they accepted as good most of their political inheritance from England and Scotland, and they put it into practice without more alterations than needed.

I think this is where both the benefits and the limitations of the claim that American is not a propositional nation can be seen. America grew organically out of the British political, legal, religious, and cultural inheritance. This inheritance was unique to a specific people and place. It did not originate in others countries, and it cannot be substituted with the political, legal, religious, and cultural inheritance of any other people and place without fundamentally transforming society.

But it is also an inheritance that cannot be defined strictly or exclusively according to people and place. It is not passed on genetically. Others can be brought cheerfully and wholeheartedly into that inheritance, as has happened repeatedly throughout America’s history, just as many (American Tories in the Revolution, for example) who came from that inheritance did not follow the American appropriation of it. Being a physical descendant of the people from whom that inheritance originated is no guarantee—today it is hardly a strong predictor—that one will cherish and preserve it. And that inheritance cannot be defined without reference to the indispensable ideas and practices that undergird it: Protestantism, rule of law, parliamentary government, freedom from overbearing governmental paternalism, and so on. Though there are many difficulties in doing so today, it is an inheritance worth maintaining and passing on to future generations.

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