(Part 2 of a 3 part series)
Americans, contrary to what some scholars and many political pundits have consistently suggested, have been and remain profoundly influenced by ideology. The insistence that American politics is best explained by non-ideological considerations has inspired a long and well-documented literature in America which resonates to the present. Even today, some American intellectuals are afflicted by this peculiar aversion to the world of ideas; their aversion prompts them to deny that the political views of ordinary citizens are shaped by ideas. They reject the basic insight derived from phenomenological philosophy - i.e. that people participate in a shared perception of social reality that is often based upon a mutually-shared worldview.
Daniel Boorstin was not unique among American historians who have
denied that the political perceptions of Americans are shaped by a
political philosophy, "The genius of American democracy comes not from
any special virtue of the American people but from the unprecedented
opportunities of this continent and from a peculiar and unrepeatable
combination of historical circumstances. These circumstances have given
our institutions their character and their virtues. The very same facts
which explain these virtues, explain also our inability to make a
'philosophy' of them. They explain our lack of interest in political
theory, and why we are doomed to failure in any attempt to sum up our
way of life in slogans and dogmas..."
Boorstin insisted that
the antipathy to political theory which Americans express is based upon
a sound conviction that "an explicit political theory is superfluous
because we already possess a satisfactory equivalent...the belief that
values in America are in some way or other automatically defined: given by certain facts of geography or history peculiar to us."
Unfortunately this kind of argument -which endorses the myth of
"American exceptionalism" -is profoundly ahistorical and
anti-intellectual. Essentially, it denies that humans are sentient
beings who understand social reality based upon the sets of ideas which
constitute their worldview. From where did the ideas of the Founders
come? If American values are always implicit in American institutions,
were the implicit values just randomly chosen from some kind of
intellectual smorgasbord, or was the creation of these institutions the
result of some overarching design--i.e. a political theory? Did the
choice of institutions create the values which Boorstin praises as "a
perfect and complete political theory," or did the chosen values create
the institutions?
Subsequently, this penchant for "common sense"
reasoning was transmitted to the New World where it was popularized by
Puritan divines such as Jonathan Edwards and became part of what has
been described as the New England Mind. To quote Harvard Historian
Louis Hartz in his justly famous book, The Liberal Tradition in America,
"Pragmatism, interestingly enough America's greatest contribution to
philosophic tradition...feeds itself on the Lockean settlement. It is
only when you take your ethics for granted that all problems emerge as
problems of technique." By the 18th century, as Carl Becker once noted,
"Most Americans had absorbed Locke's works as a kind of political
gospel; and the Declaration, in its form, in its phraseology follows
certain sentences in Locke's second treatise on government."
Jefferson, Madison and John Adams, among many others, were intimately
familiar with the most minute details of Locke's political philosophy.
Jefferson, in fact, was so impressed by Locke's arguments that he read
Locke's treatise on civil government three times and used Locke's
compact theory of government to justify the American Revolution, just as
Locke's treatise had, almost a century before, been interpreted to
justify the "Glorious Revolution" of 1680 and the ouster of the Catholic
Stuart kings.
Francis Fukuyama, a zealous defender of the U.S. political status-quo, acknowledges in his tome, The End of History,
that "The American founding was thoroughly if not wholly imbued with
the ideas of John Locke. Thomas Jefferson's 'self-evident' truths about
the right of men to Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were not
essentially different from Locke's natural rights to life and property."
As he further observes, "The principles underlying
American democracy, codified in the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, were based on the writings of Jefferson, Madison,
Hamilton, and the other American Founding Fathers who in turn derived
many of their ideas from the English liberal tradition of Thomas Hobbes
and John Locke. If we are to uncover the self-understanding of the
world's oldest liberal democracy--a self-understanding that has been
adopted by many democratic societies outside North America--we need to go
back to the political writings of Hobbes and Locke."
The
historical record shows that Alexander Hamilton and John Jay also
uncritically accepted Locke's argument that one of the primary duties of
government was to protect private property; and they invoked Locke's
argument to urge an end to the Articles of Confederation. British
political theorist Harold Laski has argued that " The view taken by
Madison was fully shared by such contemporaries as Jefferson, Marshall,
and Alexander Hamilton. It was responsible for that interpretation of
the Constitution which, under the masterful Chief Judgeship of Marshall,
gave to the claims of property its special place in the American
system. Their whole purpose was to prevent the invasion of those claims
by the masses, and they were successful in that effort."
Because the U.S. constitutional system, as devised by the Founding
Fathers, is essentially an extension and an endorsement of Locke's
politics, Locke's political philosophy has become the scripture from
which almost all subsequent American political thought has been divined;
it is the primary inspiration for what is commonly known as the
American Creed.
In England, Locke's ideas were subsequently
refined and further elaborated by David Hume and Adam Smith, David
Ricardo, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill. His political doctrine,
however, was also vigorously challenged by a number of English critics
during the nineteenth and the twentieth century. By contrast, here in
the United States, Locke's ideas, to borrow a phrase from John Kenneth
Galbraith, gained acceptance as the "conventional wisdom." Thus, during
the intervening centuries, legions of American thinkers, politicians and
pundits have embraced the liberalism of Locke's political philosophy,
either as a matter of conscious preference or cultural inheritance.
In point of fact, Locke's political philosophy has so successfully and
thoroughly insinuated itself into American political thinking that it
has created significant intellectual confusion. Today many Americans
describe themselves as conservatives despite the fact that the core
values that they profess owe their debt Locke rather than to Thomas
Aquinas or Edmund Burke; their values are thus profoundly liberal.
Ironically, those whom these self-described conservatives often
derisively dismiss as liberals are those who generally share the same
commitment to Locke's ideas and his political legacy as they, although
they may differ about specific policy prescriptions and the proper role
of government.
This confusion is so pervasive that Herbert
Hoover, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush and his
father, to cite recent examples, are invariably described as
conservatives, although each of these individuals have expressed
political ideas that have little in common with the tradition of
conservatism as a political philosophy.
More than two
centuries after the founding of this republic, the constitutional system
that is based upon Locke's ideas exhibits pronounced signs of advanced
institutional atherosclerosis. Further, because the process required to
amend the federal constitution is so arduous, meaningful institutional
reform is virtually impossible. As a consequence, American liberal
democracy together with the market economy - which is based upon those
same liberal values and ideas - have become irrelevant for millions upon
millions of American citizens who see little reason for optimism since
they have effectively been frozen out of the political system.
