Peter H Schuck - Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation

Table of Contents

An illuminating effort to explain America to the worldand to itself.... A nuanced, warts-and-all portrait that offers much to ponder in this election year and beyond.

Kirkus (starred review)

If the candidates want an authoritative up-to-date portrait of the vast, complex, and endlessly fascinating country they hope to lead, this is the book for them.

From start to finish, its a highly worthwhile book.

Understanding America is aimed in major part at foreign observers of the country. And it ought to be the first thing read by every ambassador coming to America to represent another country and by every foreign leader and foreign minister. But it also ought to be required reading for every one of our presidential candidates, American ambassadors going abroad, and members of Congress. This marvelous book offers insights and revelations on almost every page for insiders and outside observers alike, for sophisticated experts on American politics, culture, and policy and for those who dont really understand what makes America tick. Nearly unique in an edited volume, every essay is clearly written and deftly drawn. If he were alive, Alexis de Tocqueville would call it a tour de force.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN, resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute

This book is thick, but it does the work of about a dozen, maybe more.With its gold-standard contributors and well-chosen, authoritative essays, Understanding America captures more facets of our complicated country than I ever thought a single book could.

JONATHAN RAUCH, senior writer, National Journal, and guest scholar, the Brookings Institution

This compendium of essays by distinguished social scientists provides a more comprehensive and perhaps richer education in what academics call American studies than do most college courses in the field. It is two books in one: an unparalleled introduction to Americas most distinctive attributes for observers from abroad and interested citizens alike; and a compendium of data and analysis supporting the ideas that America is unique among nations and that despite extremely grave problems, this American exceptionalism is often a good thing. Furthermore, these essays illuminate the nature of the challenges that America faces and help lay the intellectual foundations for efforts to surmount them.

STUART TAYLOR, National Journal columnist and Newsweek contributor

What makes America unique? Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson have assembled a first-class group of experts to set out, for every aspect of American life from political culture to philanthropy, how America stands apart from other nations, for better or worse.

MICHAEL BARONE, coauthor, The Almanac of American Politics, and resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute

The stakes in understanding America could hardly be higher. For better and for worse, America is the 800-pound gorilla in every room in the world.When it has an itch, the world scratches.When it gets a cold, the world sneezes. Its actionsand its failures to actoften send ripples around the globe. For some, it is a model for other societies to emulate. For others, it is one to avoid. Unless Americans gain a sophisticated understanding of the nations political institutions, cultures, and policies, they will be poorly positioned to think and act as effective citizens. Unless our observers from abroad acquire this understanding, they will be ill-equipped to comprehend the American systems and policies that are inexorably shaping their lives.

All the more astonishing, then, is the absence of any authoritative, up-to-date, accessible, comprehensive, and single-volume account of American institutions, cultures, and policies. Should American or foreign readers want to learn how and why these institutions, cultures, and policies are distinctive from those in other advanced liberal democracies, how they work (and dont work), which social forces are operating to transform them, what major challenges they face in the future, and how those challenges might be addressed, they will be frustrated and disappointed.

This book seeks to fill that void, to explain America to itself and to its foreign observers. Some sort of explanation is clearly needed. Today, American politics often seem to be polarized between those who see this country through the eyes of either a hard-core liberal or a rock-ribbed conservative. Just how deeply this polarization accurately represents the thinking of most Americans is unclear. Some political scientists such as Morris Fiorina believe that we are not deeply polarized, while others, such as Alan Ambramowitz, argue that we are. What is very clear, however, is that Congress, interest groups, and the mass media are divided into two camps that disagree about almost everything. For Americans marinating in their own society, a clear understanding of its nature and distinctiveness remains elusive.

Our friends in Europe, Asia, and Latin America see America from a distance, but that perspective yields little insight. All of them see the American nation as a superpower, but many suppose that it is one managed by some strange combination of a vulgar popular culture, a rigid and intolerant religious revival, a bullying military establishment, a ruthlessly predatory capitalism, and a callous indifference to the plight of poor people.

It is a bit odd for any nation to be deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those in need, while maintaining a political stability, a standard of living, and a love of country that are the envy of the worldall at the same time.To do all these things at once, America must indeed be unusual. Or even, as Alexis de Tocqueville said a century and a half ago, exceptional. Of course, Tocqueville meant something else by American exceptionalism: he was trying to explain to his European friends what this new phenomenon, democracy, meant in practice. Nobody then knew what it meant to live in a country where equality of condition was so widespread and where the common people actually ruled themselves. Tocqueville, himself an aristocrat, spent nine months in this country trying to understand what the great democratic revolution was all about. He thought it rested on individualism, a quality about which he had mixed feelings. The many subsequent discussions of American exceptionalism have focused on one or another aspect of the society, such as the absence of a strong socialist movement or the preference for a weak state, but have not analyzed, as our authors do here, the many specific manifestations of American exceptionalism in a wide range of institutional and policy domains. Never before has the debate over American exceptionalism been so firmly grounded in detailed social scientific findings. We consider this to be a major and, well, exceptional contribution of this volume.

Americans have embraced democracy even as they complain endlessly about its problems. And democracy has spread throughout the world, so much so that only a few ideologues, tyrants, or reactionaries now denounce it. But foreigners find American-style democracy lacking in many good qualities. Americans may proudly think of their nation as exceptional, but many foreigners roll their eyes and complain that Americans often deviate from the democratic ideal.