American Perfectionalism: The Constitution

Today, we observe Constitution Day. While the Constitution itself is quite old, Constitution Day is not--as a federally recognized celebration, it only dates back to 2004. The law passed that year requires federally-funded educational institutions to mark the day by paying some formal attention to the document. Given the regularly exposed ignorance of many American citizens about what is actually in the Constitution, this generally seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

All good ideas, however, end up becoming political footballs. In South Carolina last week, Constitution Day became a pretext to attack President Obama's alleged lack of dedication to the document.

At a "Take Our Country Back" rally in Greenville, Rep. Trey Gowdy said "Is it OK for me too say 'God bless you?' Is it OK for me to say 'God bless the United States of America?'" Evidently Gowdy has been spending time in some alternate universe in which this is not OK. He must have missed the endless repetition of those words by speakers at the Democratic convention in Charlotte.

At that same rally, one of the sponsors said that he is often asked where he wishes to take the country back to, and the answer was "all the way back, right back to the Constitution." Another, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, said when they are criticized for wanting to go back, conservatives need to reply "you need to have more faith in a 223-year-old document called the Constitution than you do in the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

It should go without saying that no one should want to go all the way back to the version of the Constitution that existed 223 years ago. That document explicitly protected slavery: it allowed the unrestricted importation of slaves for another 20 years, it provided for the return of runaway slaves, it treated slaves as 3/5 of a person for purposes of representation.

Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not guarantee the right to vote to freedmen in 1865? Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not require the states to recognize the Bill of Rights? Do they want to go back to the Constitution that did not guarantee women the right to vote well into the 20th century?

No doubt they would answer that of course they don't want to go back to those parts of the Constitution. But they also do not offer those qualifiers. If asked, they'd say no. But they don't volunteer that information. To do so would be to admit that the Constitution was, from its beginnings, flawed. And that's a problem for them.

For reasonable people, it is easy both to respect the Constitution and its strengths, while bemoaning its failings. That is what adults do: they see complexity, they see shades of grey.

Far too many American conservatives, however, have elevated the Constitution to the status of Holy Writ. Some even claim that it is divinely inspired. How can the Constitution be divinely inspired if it is also flawed?

I realize that saying that the Constitution is not perfect is sacrilege to some ears. But that is precisely the problem.

When we take the work of fallible men and transform it into a sacred text, and argue that all we need to do to return the nation to a state of grace is to "go back to the Constitution," we convert political debate into theological dispute. That is what is wrong with the increasingly religious language that today's conservatives employ when discussing the Constitution.

We hear a lot these days from Republicans about "American exceptionalism." But in fact, that's not what they mean. What they really are insisting on is American perfectionalism.

That is the inevitable consequence of turning American history into a Bible story. It is not enough that the arc of the story be a positive one. It must have a creation story in which the hand of God is explicitly credited with establishing the nation. God's creation is not just exceptional--it cannot be questioned. It is not merely striving (in the actual words of the Constitution) to "create a more perfect Union." It is, in some fundamental sense, already perfect.

While its leaders may be wrong--as conservatives insist Obama almost always is--America never is. Its ideals are perfect, and there is never any reason to "apologize" for anything. There is never any reason to doubt.

We do not honor the Constitution by distorting it. If we wish truly to honor the Constitution on this Constitution Day, we should remember the humility of the men who wrote it and their explicit recognition that it was--from the beginning--assumed to be a flawed instrument.

Part of the Constitution's genius is that it contains within it a mechanism to change it. I can think of no more eloquent statement of imperfection. The very people who wrote it took its imperfections for granted, and provided the means of correcting them.

The amendment process was an invitation to improve, an invitation we the people have exercised 27 times in our history in our quest to become "more perfect." That phrase is our challenge. It does not ask of us smug self-satisfaction at our own perfection. It demands that we always ask how we can make our Union more perfect.

For people who insist on America's perfection, there is only one answer to our current problems: "go back." For those who know that no work of man has ever been perfect, the answer is "go forward."

Exceptionally Selective Memory Update

Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have responded to the many criticisms of their piece on American exceptionalism. Not mine, but those of many other writers. But they do obliquely refer to one point that I made: the complete absence of any mention of slavery in their piece.

"Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England 'a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs.' Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche."

Where to begin with such a historically obtuse statement? Perhaps with the fact that the authors still cannot bring themselves to call the thing by its name: "slavery." They spill another 2,200 words and still never manage to use the word. A "worse institution" is the best they can do. I suppose one should be grateful that they didn't call it a "peculiar institution," which was the preferred euphemism for slavery for so many decades. One might note that one searches in vain to find the word in the Constitution, too. The most benign interpretation of that fact is that the authors of the Constitution were ashamed of slavery and did not want to sully the document with explicit acknowledgement of it. The refusal of Lowry and Ponnuru to call slavery by its name is the best evidence of their awareness that it was shameful and thus a mortal threat to their superficial cheerleading disguised as historical interpretation.

More substantively, anyone who can, with a straight face, assert that slavery never became part of the national psyche has forfeited any claim to be taken seriously. I am writing this piece in a building built by slave labor. Only people suffering from an extreme case of denial could honestly believe slavery never became part of the national psyche.

Even those who fought most valiantly against it, the abolitionists (whom Lowry and Ponnuru seek to claim as their own, without ever saying what they wanted to abolish), had to wrestle with how deeply slavery had embedded itself in the American mind. This is William Lloyd Garrison, writing in 1856, on the effect of slavery on slaveholders: "It has destroyed in them all sense of justice, all perception of right, all knowledge of virtue, all regard for humanity; so that, habitually, they put darkness for light, and light for darkness, and call good evil, and evil good."

When slavery was finally abolished, its advocates sought to reconstitute it in the form of the notorious black codes, which attempted to institute slavery in everything but name. When those efforts were temporarily thwarted by Reconstruction, they tried again, this time under the name Jim Crow, whose "strange career" continued into my own lifetime, and whose legacies live on still.

Even more than their original post, this rebuttal demonstrates the intellectual, historical and moral bankruptcy of their argument. In that, I suppose they have performed some small, albeit inadvertent, service.

Exceptionally Selective Memory

Because it is ultimately an emotional matter, it is hard to talk about nationalism in a dispassionate manner. What we’re dealing with, when you get down to it, is love. Even the most Spock-like among us know that love and reason don’t always work in the same direction.

When I teach the subject of nationalism in Western Civilization, I give my students a piece called “The Discourse on the Love of Country” written in 1789 by Richard Price. As a child of the Enlightenment, Price takes a decidedly rational approach to the subject: “The love of our country has in all times been a subject of warm commendations; and it is certainly a noble passion; but, like all other passions, it requires regulation and direction.” Love of country is a “duty,” he argues, but it “does not imply any conviction of the superior value of [one’s own country] to other countries.”

Price is not naïve: he recognizes that, as he puts it, “[w]e are too apt to confine wisdom and virtue within the circle of our own acquaintance and party. Our friends, our country, and in short everything related to us, we are disposed to overvalue.” That is entirely natural, just as love of one’s family is. However, he argues, a “wise man will guard himself against this delusion.” Sadly, the history of the last 200 years has repeatedly demonstrated that most peoples in most nations have lacked such wisdom.

In the U.S., that delusion has most often taken the form of what is called “American exceptionalism.” This concept is at the core of a piece in the National Review this week by Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru. As they put it, “Our country has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth.”

The New Republic has a nice deconstruction of the argument by Lowry and Ponnuru, showing that what they are really arguing is that “America is exceptional because the nation’s creed is the ideology of the modern conservative movement.” What I’d like to explore is how incredibly selective their depiction of American history is.

Lowry and Ponnuru target what they, with only slightly veiled contempt, refer to as “the academy.” What they really mean is, well, people like me—i.e., trained historians who actually know their nation’s history in its true fullness, not the whitewashed, jingoistic version they prefer. These academics, they say, have created “a perverse version of American exceptionalism ... of criminality, conquest, and oppression.”

They have a point—quite a small one, but a point. It is, of course, possible to find some examples that resemble this caricature they present. But as any student of history knows, this is the natural progression of historical inquiry. Every dominant interpretation of history inevitably produces such a reaction: a revisionist interpretation that takes a contrary, often polar opposite view. What they fail to appreciate is that this “perversion” they decry is the predictable response to a previous, equally unrealistic interpretation of history: precisely the American exceptionalist theory they champion. A truly balanced view of history takes into consideration both a nation’s strengths and its flaws, its triumphs and its tragedies. That is not at all what Lowry and Ponnuru do.

In their one nod to reasonableness, they note: “None of this is to say, of course, that America is perfect. No nation can be.” Yet one searches their article in vain for any evidence of this imperfection (at least prior to the New Deal and, of course, the Obama administration). Most striking is the utter absence of any mention of slavery—this in an essay of over 5,000 words that purports to give an accurate evaluation of American history.

No doubt they would argue that to point this out is itself evidence of the way the academy seeks “to trash our Founding.” But pointing out indisputable historical fact is not to “trash” American history: it is merely an attempt to present the totality of that history rather than a selective fragment. If anyone were to argue that slavery is the only thing one needs to know about the U.S., they might have a point. But this, of course, is a straw man. No one in American political life (and no decent historian) does that. Yet plenty of people in politics take the equally distorted position that Lowry and Ponnuru advocate--it is practically an unquestionable article of faith in the Republican Party.

In their twisted view of reality, the only true interpretation of history is theirs, one in which America is not only exceptional, but utterly superior to all others in every way and essentially without any serious flaw, and therefore with nothing to learn from other nations—all of whom should blindly follow America’s lead. To grapple with historical facts such as slavery and segregation is unacceptable to them. To imply that America is anything but, as Sean Hannity regularly insists, "the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth" is to lack patriotism.

Theirs is basically the most infantile kind of nationalism. They are like little children who never move past the view that their parents are perfect, god-like arbiters of all that is good. We are all like that when we are very young. But as we mature, we come to see our parents as they are: flawed but good people, who love us and do their best. We love them without having to hold onto unrealistic illusions, loving them even more as we ourselves grapple with life's complexities and come to understand the difficulties they faced. It is a mature love, grounded in realities, not in idealized fantasies.

Cicero said: "To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child." Lowry and Ponnuru and the political vision they represent would have us forever remain in child-like ignorance of the entirety of American history. That might serve their short-term political agenda, but it would make us all easily manipulated political toddlers. Lowry and Ponnuru simplistically and ignorantly idealize the Founders, but I prefer what those Founders truly wanted: an informed citizenry.