The story appears on

Page A7

June 23, 2017

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Opinion » Book review

Materialism has destroyed ideals of America’s founding fathers

THIS book takes a useful and much-needed critical look at US foreign policy, very much in the tradition of William Appleman Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

Williams, one of the first of the “New Left” historians, challenged then-existing interpretations of American foreign policy by identifying several strands of ideological and economic self-interest that he believed both explained US behavior and also caused the United States to behave contrary to its professed ideals (as, for example, in its many interventions in the affairs of Central and South American states).

Walter McDougall’s book examines the origin and development of the conviction of America as “exceptional,” that is, as a nation charged with a special mission in the world, an idea that originated in the religious beliefs of the earliest colonialists.

While those supporting the creation of colonies in the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries were motivated more by the opportunity to secure new sources of trade and wealth than by any religious impulse, many of the actual colonists who came to America were seeking freedom from the persecutions that haunted them in Europe. In this new land, far from their former homes, it was easy to believe that they had been given a unique opportunity to start anew, free of the errors and oppressions of the Old World.

Many eloquent and influential preachers, McDougall notes, “had prepared Americans to imagine themselves a new chosen people in a new promised land with a millenarian destiny.”

Their surprising victory over England in the Revolutionary War helped convince the Founders’ generation that their new nation was destined to be “as a beacon in the night” to other nations that were still mired in tyrannical rule. McDougal says that this quickly evolved into what he calls America’s “Civil Religion,” a faith that “brooks no divergence between ideology and interest because the American Dream that venerates life and liberty also venerates opportunity, prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Unlike the covenant with God that specified desired behavior on the part of the Hebrews, however, US civil religion was rooted in material things: freedom from the interference of other nations, yes, but also in prosperity and worldly “success.” Thus, the American Dream comfortably encompasses economic-driven expansionism and helps explain why belief in both capitalism and the market system approach the status of unquestioned religious doctrines in the United States.

Accordingly, there is a clear line of continuity in how Americans came to understand their “Manifest Destiny,” beginning with their relentless Westward colonization throughout the 19th century (including the Mexican-America war and the relentless relocation of Native Americans), and then continuing with the conflict with Spain in the 1890s, the crusading effort of the First World War, and superpower dominance after World War II.

There were a few times in US history when the majority’s confidence in the assumptions underlying Manifest Destiny were shaken, however — including the civil war of the 1860s, post World War I disillusionment, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the murkier military interventions that began with the Viet Nam War — but each time, in only a matter of years, the mass of citizens returned to assuming the rightness of America’s special character and mission in the world. This more bellicose face of US foreign policy continues to manifest itself in our own time.

Currents of dissent

Nonetheless, there are also two important currents of dissent that challenge elements of this civil religion and whose roots go back to the nation’s beginning.

The first was a conviction central to the Founders: that America’s “city on the hill” was to be one of example and not of imposition. Having experienced what it was like to be ruled by others, they were firmly averse to any form of colonialism by themselves. The nation’s first president, George Washington, as he left office warned against the United States ever becoming involved in foreign alliances, believing that such a step would inevitably cause us to become mired in the ever-present disagreements between European nations, with all their befouling consequences.

The second strain of dissent is found in the beliefs and writings of those who opposed the marriage of the American Dream with the emergent gospel of unregulated markets: the Transcendentalists, utopians, Marxists and socialists of the 19th century, and the populists, progressives, and labor leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries.

These not only denounced the work-to-the-bone world of industrial capitalism, but also challenged prevailing beliefs in the “rights” of capital. They demanded a more just social order in which working men and women had the earning power to gain the material necessities for a decent life, consistently championing the right of workers to unionize, outlawing child labor, limiting the length of the work-day, and for enforcing health and safety standards for the workplace.

They realized many of their most important goals. However, since the 1970s the decline of unions, the rise of income and wealth inequality, the stagnation of middle class wages, and the outsourcing and atomization of the workplace have served to again mute the voices of those opposed to the ruthless workings of “the market” while advancing the privileges of the wealthy class.

Wearied from the nonstop military involvement of the past 20 plus years, and suffering from the engineered decline of the middle class, millions of citizens in 2016 colluded to elect to the presidency a woefully unprepared man whose rhetoric promised an end to foreign adventures and a reinvestment in working Americans. But his language was full of the nationalist-populist themes that not only did not challenge American “exceptionalism” but, rather, redirected it inwards by asserting that America’s “good people” deserved to have their own society become “great again.”

The very rawness of language and crudeness of behavior that seems all too common reveals how the ugliness and bitterness sown over the past half century has come to horrific fruition. Perhaps, but only perhaps, enough citizens will come to insist that the United States must seriously change course, remembering the Founders’ conviction that unless we build a land of truth, justice, equality, and harmony in our own country, there will be no shining “city on a hill” to serve as an inspiring beacon for others.

 

The author was a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives and also served in the Iowa executive branch. He retired in 2004. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.




 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend