The United States is exceptional in being founded not on loyalty to a monarch or charismatic leader, nor on identification with a racial or ethnic group, but on a set of ideas. We Americans take this for granted, but foreign visitors do not.
Here’s how the English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton saw us in the 1920s:
The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded upon a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice and that their authority is for that reason just. …
Here’s how Canadian sociologist Sacvan Bercovitch saw us in the 1960s:
I crossed the border into the United States and found myself inside the myth of America … a country that despite its arbitrary frontiers, despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called the True America, and could invest that patent fiction with all the moral and emotional appeal of a religious symbol. … Here was the Jewish anarchist Paul Goodman berating the Midwest for abandoning the promise; here, the descendent of American slaves, Martin Luther King, denouncing injustice as a violation of the American way; here, an endless debate about national destiny … conservatives scavaging for un-Americans, New Left historians recalling the country to its sacred mission. … It was a hundred sects and factions, each apparently different from the others, yet all celebrating the same mission.
Our American credo is based on two complementary documents, one radical and one conservative. The radical document is the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration proclaims that all human beings are endowed with inalienable rights, that governments are instituted to protect these rights, that there is a right of revolution in defense of those rights, and that 13 British colonies are free and independent states. The conservative document is the Constitution. It joins 13 free and independent states into a nation to form a more perfect union, provide for the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.
Independence Day, our patriotic holiday, commemorates the signing of the Declaration. The President of the United States, naturalized citizens, members of the armed forces and federal officers swear to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution. To understand the United States, it is necessary to understand both the Declaration and the Constitution.
Like the Bible, these documents do not interpret themselves, nor do they make clear what parts are for a particular time and situation, and what parts are truths for all time. You can pull out quotes from either document to justify many different things.
We Americans have been fighting over the meaning of these documents almost since the signing of the Declaration and the ratification of the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were both patriots who contributed greatly to the founding of the United States. But they hated each other, and each thought the other a traitor to the principles of the American republic as they conceived.
During the Civil War, the Union and Confederate soldiers and statesmen each thought they were fighting for the basic principles of American liberty. They were not equally right, but they were equally sincere.
In our own time, it is no different. The Tea Party and the American Civil Liberties Union are fighting to defend basic Constitutional rights as they conceive them. They are not equally right, but they are equally sincere.
All through American history, different groups of people have tried to define themselves as the true Americans and their opponents as the un-Americans. This can be, and has been, a very bad thing, but sometimes it is justified. At least when we argue about the meaning of Americanism, our common loyalty to the Constitution and the Declaration gives us a common point of departure. Arguing over what it means to be an American is part of our American exceptionalism.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 