TOPIC #29 — AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE

          Culture is an attribute of societies in the way personality is an attribute of individuals. Just as we observe that different people have different personalities, we also observe that different societies exhibit different widespread and enduring customs, ways of thinking, ways of interacting, ideas, values, and beliefs. Political culture refers to those aspects of culture that pertain particularly to political life — that is, how people think about politics and government, whether and how they engage in political activities, what political values and beliefs are widely shared, and so forth. American political culture is commonly deemed to be somewhat “exceptional” — that is, distinctively different from the political culture found in countries that in some ways seem quite similar (in particular, other longstanding political democracies in Europe and elsewhere).

          The most notable description of — and explanation for — American “exceptionalism” was provided about 170 years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman of more or less aristocratic background who visited the United States in 1830 during the period of the "Jacksonian Revolution." (This was the era associated with President Andrew Jackson that saw the right to vote extended to almost all white men, the creation of mass political parties [particularly including the new Democratic Party that Jackson led], and the development of intense campaign activity that for the first time mobilized large numbers of voters.) Tocqueville came to the U.S. with the intention of studying its prison system. (In Europe at the time, people convicted of even quite minor crimes were often hanged.) However, as he traveled about the country, observing American life, talking to people and taking detailed notes, he greatly broadened his interests to extend to American politics, society, and culture generally. Following his return to France, Tocqueville wrote a two-volume book titled Democracy in America (1835, 1840) based on his 1830 travels and observations. (The Federalist Papers and Democracy in America are often bracketed together as the two foundational analyses of American political life.) Tocqueville realized that the highly stratified social structure of Europe, reflecting its feudal background, was breaking down and that America represented the “wave of the future.” But he also recognized that America was distinctive precisely because it did not have a feudal inheritance to overcome.

          Tocqueville and other have observed that some political ideas and values are widely and distinctively shared in American political culture, while other ideas and values (widely shared in many other political cultures) are get much less emphasis.

          American (political) culture is said to be highly individualistic (Tocqueville invented the term): American think much more in terms of individuals (and their families) than in terms of more encompassing groups (such as social classes, ethnic groupings, or society as a whole); Americans tend to be self-interested and seek to “get ahead” (“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) mostly on the basis of individual effort (though, Tocqueville noted, American characteristically act on the basis of “self-interest rightly understood,” entailing voluntary cooperation with other self-interested individuals). The flip side of this individualism is that the values of community, social cohesion, and tradition get less attention that in many other societies. In the political realm, such individualism puts great emphasis on individual rights and liberties and correspondingly less emphasis on duties and social order. Individualism also emphasizes popular sovereignty, democracy, and assertiveness (often through political associations) over deference to elites (be they political leaders, “experts,” clergy, etc.) In the economic realm, Americans favor equality of opportunity but not equality of results (if some people get further “ahead” than others who have equal opportunities, that unequal result is quite justifiable). And since individuals occupy no established positions within a social hierarchy, they are inclined to conform to majority opinion [“the unlimited power of the majority’] and to be somewhat intolerant of dissent, eccentricity, and “un-American” ideas.

          The summary description used by social scientists (though the terminology is understandably confusing to others) is to say that American has a distinctively liberal political culture. “Liberal” here mean essentially “Lockean,” referring to the political philosophy of John Locke, which you recall postulated a state of nature from which individuals escaped by entering into a voluntary social contract (“self-interest rightly understood” again) in order secure their individual natural rights. Thus the term “liberal” in this context has no particular connection with the kind of “liberal” ideology associated with the contemporary Democratic party; today’s “liberal” Democrats are [for the most part] Lockean liberals but so also are [for the most part] today’s “conservative” Republicans (though fundamentalist Christian conservatives who postulate the “sovereignty of God” rather than “popular sovereignty” constitute something of an exception within “American exceptionalism”). It is noteworthy that both sides in the American abortion debate frame their arguments in terms of individual rights: “freedom of choice” for a women vs. “right to life” for an unborn fetus/baby. In contrast, abortion arguments in many other countries are framed more in terms of the good of society, e.g., social cohesion, population stability or growth, etc.

          Tocqueville is also associated with an argument that explains why American political culture exhibits this Lockean liberal consensus. First, what became the United States was settled by emigrants from Britain and elsewhere in Europe. (The fact that this territory already had an indigenous population [Indians] and that others came involuntarily as slaves does not fit nicely into this story.) These European emigrants were in no way a representative cross-section of societies they left. Aristocrats and other who occupied the top positions in the European hierarchy had no incentive to emigrate. Peasants and other impoverished workers had no knowledge of places more than a few miles form where they born, let alone of the “new world” across the ocean. The people who emigrated came from among those who had both knowledge of the new world and reason to seek opportunity there, and these were the people situated between extremes of privilege and poverty in the developing middle class of merchants, tradesmen, professionals, and others. Such people were already often familiar with, and supportive of, the kinds of ideas associated with John Locke — ideas that could not be realized in stratified European societies dominated by aristocrats and royal courts. Moreover, the rather strange ideas of John Locke seemed to make even more sense when they got to the new world, where they found something approximating a state of nature, where they could acquire property by mixing their labor with land, and where they could found political communities on the basis of social contracts (most famously, the Mayflower Compact). So Lockean ideas took predominant hold in what would become the United States.

          Of course, Tocqueville traveled about America 175 years ago and the earliest settlers arrived in the “new world” 200 years before that. Why has this liberal political culture been sustained to such an extent over time? Several points can be made. First, all cultures are “conservative” in the specific sense that they tend to be reproduced over time by the process that social scientists call (political) socialization — that is, basic ideal and values are transmitted from one generation to the next (mostly within families but also in schools and other settings). But wouldn’t the subsequent arrival of millions of immigrants from distinctly non-Lockean liberal societies in central, southern, and eastern Europe and, more recently, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America undermine the liberal consensus? If anything, they probably reinforce it, because only a small fraction of the people in such countries do emigrate and those who do tend (like the original settlers) to be those who find social arrangements in their homelands most constraining and the opportunity to start anew most appealing. Note that today, as in past centuries, leaving your homeland to start anew is a profoundly individualistic act that requires a willingness to break away from extended families, from local, ethnic, and language communities, and from social and religious traditions.