Charles Murray - American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He first came to national attention in 1984 with Losing Ground. His subsequent books include In Pursuit, The Bell Curve (with Richard J. Herrnstein), What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Human Accomplishment, In Our Hands, Real Education, and Coming Apart. He received a bachelors degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland.

My thanks go to Christopher DeMuth, Steven Hayward, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Michael Novak for their terrifyingly erudite reviews of the draft and the many improvements they inspired.

It is April 30, 1789, a sunny spring day, and you are a European who has traveled to New York to see the inauguration of George Washington as the first president of the United States.

Standing in the crowd in front of Federal Hall on Wall Street, you are watching the beginning of an experiment in governance unlike any in the history of the world. Four million people, spread out over thirteen colonies stretching from New England to Georgia, have separated themselves from the worlds greatest power and then invented a new nation from scratch. That all by itself makes the United States unique and also makes it impossible to predict what might happen next.

It isnt just the newness of the nation that makes its future so imponderable. The Americans could easily have chosen familiar institutions. If George Washington had been declared king of the United States, the Founding Fathers given hereditary titles, and a deliberative body created as a counterweight to the kings powers, you would have had a European framework to help you think through the new nations prospects. But instead the founders of the United States have created a form of government that will attempt all sorts of things that are widely thought to be impossible.

Republican government itself is widely thought to be impracticable and unstable. No country in continental Europe has a constitutional monarchy, let alone a republic in which all power ultimately resides in the citizens. Even Britain, Europes most politically liberal nation, still expects the sovereign to play a major role in the governance of the nation and shudders at the memory of its own brief experiment as a republic.

It is widely thought to be impossible for a nation to function with a head of state elected for a limited term. How can the Americans realistically expect a successful, popular president who is chief executive, head of state, and commander-in-chief of the nations armed forces to retire voluntarily? Every lesson of history teaches that transmission of power through an electoral system doesnt work for long.

Surely it is impossible that a piece of paper, the Constitution, can command the allegianceindeed, the reverencethat the American system will require. The consensus at the Constitutional Convention and in the debates over ratification of the Constitution is that the new Supreme Court has the power to strike down laws already passed by the legislature and implemented by the executive poweran unprecedented level of judicial independence.1

Most stunning of all, you are watching the first nation in the world translate an ideology of individual liberty into a governing creed. As an educated European of the eighteenth century, you are familiar with the ideology itself as expressed by John Locke and other writers of the Enlightenment. But philosophy is one thing. It is quite another to restrict the power of the central government as radically as the new American Constitution does.

Your imaginary self at the inauguration of George Washington had many real counterparts in the early decades of our history. A long line of Europeansmost famously Alexis de Tocqueville, but also widely read observers such as Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, and Charles Dickens, plus thousands of other lesser-known visitorswrote books, letters, and journals describing the Americans to their fellow countrymen. They often had the tone of a zoologist writing about a hitherto unknown species. For whatever else these observers might say about the United States, they all agreed on one thing: the United States was quite unlike their own or any other nation. It was exceptional.

The concept of American exceptionalism has been used in many ways. Some have interpreted exceptional to mean wonderful, and American exceptionalism has been used as a framework for describing whatever the proponent thinks is wonderful about America.2 It has been interpreted to mean that America has a special mission in the world and used in support of whatever measures that mission is taken to imply.3 Those who dont like the idea of American exceptionalism have attempted to refute it by pointing to the ways in which the history of the United States parallels that of other great imperial powers, arguing that the United States has the same awful defects as other empires.4

So the concept of American exceptionalism has become associated with meanings that are filled with emotion and value judgmentsintertwined with patriotism, for those who approve of it, or connoting jingoism or chauvinism, for those who disapprove. I write about American exceptionalism from another tradition that has four characteristics:

American exceptionalism is a concept that was shared by observers throughout the Western world, not just Americans. The Founders certainly believed that they were creating something of extraordinary significance. Thats why the motto on the Great Seal of the United States is novus ordo secloruma new order of the ages. But it was foreigners who took the lead in describing the United States and Americans as being unlike all other countries and peoples.

American exceptionalism does not imply American excellence or superiority. Americans tend to think that most of the traits of American exceptionalism are positive, but others, especially European elites, have always disagreed. Even those of us who think they are positive must acknowledge aspects of American exceptionalism that are problematic.

American exceptionalism is a fact of Americas past, not something that you can choose whether to believe in any more than you can choose whether to believe in the battle of Gettysburg. Understanding its meaning is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand what it has meant to be an American.

American exceptionalism refers to qualities that were first observed in the opening century of our history. Theres no reason why they necessarily still apply today. The extent to which they still apply is an empirical question.

America in the nineteenth century was exceptional in many ways, and there is no uniquely right way to group them. My choice has been to group them under these four headings: America as a geographic setting, American ideology, traits of the American people, and the operation of the American political system.

Most nineteenth-century foreigners and modern scholars have ascribed the unusual traits of Americans to our ideology and political system. But when the country began, the Founders were unanimously of the opinion that their creation could work in practice only because of qualities that already existed in the American peopletheir honesty, industriousness, religiosity, and morality, to name four that all of the Founders discussed in one way or another.5