Introspective America

In a 1998 essay, “Is America an Experiment?” Wilfred McClay notes that, for all our supposed materialism and pragmaticism, Americans are “a remarkably introspective people,” with an “incorrigible” habit of trying to divine the meaning of our country.

McClay lists a selection of options: “First, there is the Puritan idea of America as a probationary ‘errand into the wilderness’ and Americans as a people called to a mission of redemption and a life of the most rigorous self-examination. There are the universalistic accents of theEnlightenment, thought to have resonated especially widely anddeeply in the American context. There is the tendency, whether republican, Enlightened, or romantic, to see American life as aliberation from the corrupt and arbitrary constraints of customand tradition, and as a recovery of the innocence and authenticity of Nature . . . .

“There is the unusual degree of self-conscious deliberation with which America, as ‘the first new nation,’ wasbrought into being and its principal institutions founded. There is the broadly inclusive creedal or ideological (rather than narrowly cultural or racial) basis of American national identity—the sort of thing that made Chesterton call the United States ‘a nation with the soul of a church.’ There is the libertarian, Live Free or Die conception of America as the one place on earthwhere you ought to be able to do exactly as you please. And finally, as I have already mentioned, there is the identificationof America as the prototype and exemplar of modernity. All these conceptions have contributed to, and perpetuated, deep seated ideas of national distinctiveness.”

Labels and slogans to describe our essence have proliferated over the centuries: “the New Israel, the City Upon a Hill, the Empire of Reason, the New Eden, Nature’s Nation, the Nation Dedicated to a Proposition, the Great Refuge or Asylum, the Melting Pot, the Land of Opportunity, the transnational ‘Nation of Nations,’ the Novus Ordo Seclorum, the Redeemer Nation, the Almost-Chosen People, the Last Best Hope of Mankind, and, most recently,the Indispensable Nation.”

And the remarkable thing is that so many of these have more than a grain of truth.