The American Idea

The Atlantic's November 2007 issue featured many short pieces by a variety of thinkers about the "American Idea." This collection is only available to subscribers - so you should subscribe because this is a damn good magazine (for over 150 years now!).

This idea about the American Idea comes from the magazine's founding:

It was founded on an encompassing abstraction, expressed in the words that appeared in the first issue and that appear again on the cover of this one: In politics, it would "honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea."

I wanted to excerpt a couple of the quotes I really liked, but I had to include enough for the context.

On the first page of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck informs us that the Widow Douglas decided to take him up and "sivilize" him, but

it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out.

The way Huck subverts a whole way of living, a way of thinking and relating to the world, by misspelling a word is to my mind a pure expression of the American idea. That idea is always threatened by another: the secure and smug world from which Huck and Jim turn away. Throughout the book, Huck and Jim turn the "decent" and "sivilized" world on its head, and we come out in the end with a new definition of these words.

...

The idea that I want to believe America was founded on also depended on challenging the world as it is and, by standing up to civilized society, redefining it. That idea was essentially based on a poetic vision, on imagining something that did not exist.

...

Huck closes his adventures with this statement:

But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

This, of course, is the whole point: In order to keep the American idea fresh and new, it must be constantly challenged. For the American idea to endure, we have to "light out," and to find new ways to resist the "sivilizing" impulse of the Widow Douglases and Aunt Sallys among us.

And yet today it seems that America, gripped by social and political crisis, has become almost forgetful of that idea. Cynical, shallow, defensive, and at the same time arrogant and greedy, it is unfaithful to its instincts and refuses to be reflective, mistaking blame for criticism and self-criticism, and believing that success at any cost is more important than failure with honor, taking as its ideal the Widow Douglas’s paradise rather than Huck Finn’s hell.

Help Wanted - by Alan Wolfe

This country was once needier than it is today. Neediness is not an attractive characteristic, neither of people nor of nations. Yet we were better off wanting things the rest of the world had to offer than we are now, when we need so little from everyone else.

The most obvious thing we once needed was people. Underpopulated, this country extended a welcome to others who not only enriched our economy but strengthened our culture ...

But now we have Lou Dobbs. Forget, if you can, his nativistic populism. This is a man who radiates self-satisfaction. There is no question in his mind that America needs nothing from the rest of the world. In wanting to close the country, Dobbs closes his mind. A society that no longer needs people has no need to question anything it does.

...

Self-sufficiency is a wonderful thing, but it comes with a price. Dependency can be crippling, yet it can also be revealing. The American idea worth striving for is not supreme military power—where has that gotten us in Iraq?—nor is it economic autarky, not in this globalized world. The idea for which we should strive is interdependence, recognizing that we need others just as others need us.

I should also note that Lahaye - creator of the Left Behind fundamentalist (dare I claim, Christian) book series - had a short piece on the American idea in which he ridiculously claimed the American public schools have been conquered by God-hating secularists ... one wonders if he has talked to a school teacher recently? Most of the ones I know also believe in God and many of them attend Christian churches as well...

To be clear, Lahaye hates America - a country founded on a Constitution that does not establish a theocracy.