I receive a periodic email from The Atlas Society, and they send this out for free, but I much enjoy their content. Their Senior Fellow Robert Tracinski wrote an article on January 16, 2025, entitled America Absolutely Is An Idea.
I have not read the article yet, which is shown below in its entirety, but I will respond to it for the reader, and my initial sense is that Robert will argue that America is the Ideal, Exceptional, Unsurpassed country which, though not perfect, is pretty darned good, and perhaps about as good as we can expect, and that is my view.
Below the article starts with Robert’s introductory summary of his article.
Robert (R after this): “Is America defined by ideas or by its people and traditions? Why is the distinction between ideas and traditions significant for understanding America’s history? Atlas Society Senior Fellow Robert Tracinski answers these questions, among others, in a recent article discussing the central ideas in defining America’s identity, highlighting the tension between America as an “idea” and America as a “people.” “
My response: America is defined by its ideas gained from our English heritage, Enlightenment values and culture, the practice here of free market economics, and our Judeo-Christian heritage. Based in this ideas and ideals, America’s Founders put them into practice, setting up our constitutional republic, and it has led to a nation run by the masses not experts, elites, the rich or intellectuals.
R: “’The fact that America was founded on ideas rather than specific traditions or customs also explains the cultural dynamism that is characteristic of America and essential to its greatness.… Because America has never been defined by the attempt to preserve a static way of life, we have been able to adapt to constant economic and technological change, producing entirely new cultural movements along the way.””
My response: We were influenced by Greek, European, Christian, and Jewish traditions, and customers, but we were conceived by the Founders living out the dynamic, Modern life of neo-science, discovery, innovation and dynamic, forward-looking idealism, so this did foster the cultural dynamism that is characteristic to American, and essential to its greatness. Robert points out that our progressive, innovative, activist orientation allowed us to look and live forward, innovating with economic and technological changes which built new cultural movements along the way. I like his take on America and its historical evolution.
R: “January 16, 2025
America Is Absolutely an Idea
From the beginning, America’s identity has been defined by ideas, not blood and soil.”
My response: America’s identity has primarily been defined by ideas, not blood and toil, but we have fought many wars, and the bountiful and variety natural resources and rich soil here did give Europe’s peasants and misfits a remarkable place to uplift themselves, building a nation along the way.
R: “Is America an idea? Obviously, the country as such is not a disembodied abstraction. It has territory and a population and long-established institutions. But the question is whether our culture and institutions are based on an idea and defined by an idea.”
My response: Yes, America is based on an idea and defined by an idea.
R: “’In his speech explaining his decision not to run for re-election, President Biden answered this question one way: ‘America is an idea… the most powerful idea in the history of the world. … We are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.’ The week before, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance seemed to go in the other direction, declaring, ‘America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history,’ ‘a homeland.’ He added: ‘People will not fight for abstractions.’”
My response: I like Biden’s explanation and description of America as an idea, the most powerful idea in the history of the world. J.D. Vance is not correct, that America is not just an idea. He would have done better to claim that America the Ideal is mostly an idea, but that is it also more than that: it is a group of people with a shared history and a homeland.
Yes, people will fight for abstractions: there would have been no mass movements or bloody, violent holy cusses fought over unless—sadly--the masses, slaughtered in the tens of millions in the 29th century--as passionate, true believers, were unwilling to fight and die for mere abstractions.
There are ideals or abstractions worth fighting and dying for, but that bloody resort should be one’s last resort, because God wants us to live for and make real our ideals, and that is what Americans have done so well for over 200 years.
R: “Vance was straddling the fence a bit, as politicians tend to do, allowing for some role for ideas in America’s identity. But he was widely understood to be making a nod toward the nationalist conservative position that America is not defined by ideas but is instead a set of people, a geographic place, and most of all “specific practices, traditions and customs”—the “experience of intergenerational communities.” National Review’s Rich Lowry boils it down, somewhat dubiously, to the Protestant King James Bible. Lord Baltimore could not be reached for comment.
This rejection of America’s ideological roots is supposed to be an appeal to our shared national history—yet ironically it attempts to overturn centuries of American history.”
My response: I have never read Robert before, but the two paragraphs above largely make sense, though I like Vance’s take on what defines America, as a secondary cause, the primary source of our identity being Robert’s suggestion that ideas shaped America most.
R: “Drinking Coffee with John Adams
The nationalist conservatives begin by overturning the history and tradition of the conservative movement itself. It was Margaret Thatcher who told conservatives at a 1991 meeting at the Hoover Institution that America was ‘built upon an idea—the idea of liberty,” in remarks that were widely paraphrased as: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.’ “
My response: The more I hear, the more that I agree with Robert, but still in part, America was created by European history and defined by the influences alluded to above by Vance.
With the founding of our country during the Age of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on democracy, science, capitalism, secularism, innovative technology and individualism, there is no doubt that philosophy and ideas were precursors to the influences upon America, which came after them and were downstream from them, the influences highlighted above by Vance.
R: “In an early speech, Ronald Reagan declared, ‘America is less of a place than an idea,’ and in his famous farewell address in 1989, he was even more emphatic: ‘America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise.’”
My response: Yes, America is a place that grew out of an idea, the idea of America as freedom and liberty, with all its derivative freedoms of speech, religion, free enterprise, etc.
R: “Reagan and Thatcher were right. After all, if America was defined by customs and culture, we might not have struck out on our own as an independent country. Our original cultural identity was British, and in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the founders routinely referred to the colonies as “British America.” Our ties to Britain and its culture, history and even its monarchy were strong, and we wouldn’t have staged a revolution and begun moving away from that cultural identity if not for those pesky ideas.
Consider, for example, one of our traditional American folkways: our love of coffee. Like all British people, we used to love tea—but in protest against Parliament’s tax on tea, we not only threw the stuff into Boston Harbor, we boycotted tea altogether. In a 1774 letter to his wife, John Adams recalled arriving after a long journey and asking his hostess for tea. “No sir, said she, we have renounced all tea in this place. I can’t make tea, but I’ll make you coffee.” He continues: “Accordingly I have drank coffee every afternoon since and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced.”
Thus began a tax protest we’re still engaged in 250 years later. Americans still drink less than one-eighth as much tea per capita as the British. We changed our habits and customs to conform to our ideals.”
My response: I am an anglophile (Ramsey is an English name from West Pennard in southwest England.), so I would describe America political, economic, and cultural tradition is British + the ideals that fomented the American revolution.
R: “In an 1818 letter, Adams argued that “the real American Revolution” was a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affection of the people,” and he specifically contrasted this to our traditions and customs.
The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise.
Thus, he recommends the project of “searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people and compose them into an independent nation.” He describes America’s national identity as being forged through a shared ideology.”
My response: Yes, America’s national identity was forged through a common ideology.
R: “The Rights of Englishmen Man
But it goes deeper than this. In a recent book that is probably the most detailed deep dive into the Declaration of Independence, Clemson University historian Brad Thompson describes a fascinating evolution in the American debate leading up to the Revolution, a transformation ‘from the traditional rights of Englishmen to the rights of nature.’
The Americans began by appealing to the rights of Englishmen, a narrow conception of rights as the customary privileges obtained by a certain people based on history and tradition. But when these appeals were rebuffed, they started to take a more philosophical approach.
It was in reaction to the Sugar and Stamp Acts that American revolutionaries discovered, as William Pierce put it in an oration, “how to define the rights of nature—how to search into, to distinguish, and to comprehend, the principles of physical, moral, religious, and civil liberty.” From the beginning of the imperial crisis, declared Joseph Warren, the ‘attempt of the British Parliament to raise a revenue from America, and our denial of their right to do it, have excited an almost universal enquiry into the rights of mankind in general.’”
My response: The American Founders, especially Jefferson, believed that Americans had legal rights as Americans that should match legal rights of every Englishman in England. Robert also identifies that these Enlightenment Age thinkers believed that by studying nature, philosophers could detect, as moral realists, objective moral rights, and standards of right and wrong that underpin America ethically, politically, and constitutional rights. Robert appears to refer to these natural rights as the ideas that drove the American revolution and led to the rising of the American legal and cultural tradition.
There are also revealed rights which could be gleaned from the study of the Bible, which also influenced our Founders, most of whom were Christian.
R: “It became commonplace for passages from John Locke and other liberal philosophers to be printed in newspapers across America. After a while, they were printed without attribution because by that point everybody knew where the quotations were from. After a few years of this, American stopped talking about the “rights of Englishmen” and started talking about ‘the rights of man.’ They went from the specific and traditional to the abstract and universal.”
My response: I like Robert’s line of thinking that the human rights that the Founders attributed to all Americans came to be regarded as universal human rights, not just rights owned by English citizens in England or in the colonies.
R: “By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote these universal principles into the Declaration of Independence, he could honestly say that they expressed the “common sense of the subject,” a viewpoint universally accepted by the founders of the new nation.
A New Birth of Freedom
In his speech, J.D. Vance describes having ancestors “born around the time of the Civil War” just before stating that “people will not fight for abstractions.” But the Civil War was fought over abstractions.
To be sure, the Confederacy was fighting for its local folkways and traditions, its “peculiar institution.” By contrast, in the Gettysburg Address, when Abraham Lincoln set out to rally the nation to rededicate itself to a costly and brutal war that was still unfinished, he described America as a nation ‘conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’”
My response: Yes, the Civil War was a battle over vying abstractions, and vying ways of life.
R: “I can’t imagine how the nationalist conservatives account for the Civil War. Do they think we were fighting each other over differences in our accents or customs? Only a large and fundamental ideological issue—the contradiction between slavery and the principles of the founding of the United States—could have prompted such a massive national bloodletting.
When they say that no one fights for an abstraction, the nationalists are implicitly assuming that ideas are empty of content, mere hot air without substance. (They can speak for themselves on that, I suppose.) But according to the empiricist philosophy that was widely accepted in the founding era, abstractions are based on and refer to concrete facts. When we fought the American Revolution over the abstraction of ‘liberty,’ we were fighting over the very substantial issues of taxes and representation and government power. When we fought the Civil War over the abstraction of ‘equality,’ we were fighting over the very concrete reality of millions of innocent people held in cruel bondage.’”
My response: Robert is correct that abstractions and ideals are upstream from nationalist, religious, cultural and political developments, but we should have abstractions that we live by, without inverting them into a holy cause, a toxic ideology to be worshiped.
R: “Also consider the implication of those people’s release from bondage. If America were only a “people”—well, the largest one-day expansion in the people of America was the passage of the 14th Amendment and its recognition of the citizenship of 4 million former slaves. In this case, it is the American ideal of equality that literally helped create the American people.
The Civil War has often been described as a kind of second founding of America, as integral to its history as the first founding. Much of our subsequent history flows from it. There is a direct line from Locke’s theory of individual rights to the Declaration of Independence, to the Civil War, and finally to Martin Luther King Jr. evoking these same ideas in support of the Civil Rights Movement.
There is no coherent account of American history that does not recognize the central role of liberal ideas in shaping everything else.
TV Land Politics
The fact that America was founded on ideas rather than specific traditions or customs also explains the cultural dynamism that is characteristic of America and essential to its greatness. All the way back in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the American philosophical method,” our habitual way of approaching the world.
To escape from imposed systems, the yoke of habit, family maxims, class prejudices, and to a certain extent national prejudices as well; to treat tradition as valuable for information only and to accept existing facts as no more than a useful sketch to show how things could be done differently and better; to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason of things.
This is why we’ve been able to expand so far geographically, spanning from coasts to mountains to plains, and from tropics to desert to tundra. This is why we’ve been able to absorb, from the very beginning, people from so many clashing backgrounds and different faiths—from Ireland to Eastern Europe to Africa and Asia. It’s why we have happily absorbed and appropriated everybody’s cuisine, from the once-exotic pie known as “pizza” to tacos and beyond. Because America has never been defined by the attempt to preserve a static way of life, we have been able to adapt to constant economic and technological change, producing entirely new cultural movements along the way.
Nationalist conservatives want to take this great, dynamic nation and freeze its identity at one imaginary point in time, usually an idealized TV Land version of 1960. They want to stop it at lemonade stands, Chevrolet cars and Norman Rockwell paintings (which just illustrates their ignorance of their own traditions, because Rockwell was a notable liberal). In their view, we will maintain the traditions, the customs, the folkways—and the ethnic and racial composition—that we had then. This is a narrow-minded philosophy of stasis.
Rejecting the dynamism of American society reflects the basic contradiction of the nationalist conservatives. They are trying to conserve a culture that was based on a liberal tradition. They are trying to reduce a nation founded on universal ideas into a nation of static, concrete customs.
To do this is to destroy America in the name of preserving it.
About the author:
Rob Tracinski studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and has been a writer, lecturer, and commentator for more than 25 years. He is the editor of Symposium, a journal of political liberalism, is a columnist for Discourse magazine, and writes The Tracinski Letter. He is the author of So Who Is John Galt Anyway? A Reader’s Guide to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
My response: I like Robert’s view but I am not sure that his enemy should be national conservatives, whatever that is: we can remain a vibrant secular society, without refusing to capture our religious and cultural roots from the past.
Here is a quick definition of nationalist conservatism from Wikipedia on 2/6/25: “Ideologically, national conservatism is not a uniform philosophy but adherents have broadly expressed support for nationalism, patriotism, assimilationism and monoculturalism. At the same time there is expressed opposition to internationalism, racial politics, multiculturalism and globalism.[25][26][27] National conservatives adhere to a form of cultural nationalism that emphasizes the preservation of national identity as well as cultural identity. As a result, many favor assimilation into the dominant culture, restrictions on immigration and strict law and order policies.[6][5] “
Now there is not much in there that does seem to conflict with Trump populism. Whatever Robert’s point is, I do not think he is proposing a historical interpretation of America, where it came from, and where it will emerge at in 20 years that is not compatible with nationalist conservatism.
He is right that we want to maintain the political ideals bestowed upon us by our Founders.
I have not read Robert at all, and, in his Tracinski report, he likely has explained his reservations about nationalist conservatism. One would think a capitalist and eloquent historian like Robert, speaking for and acclaimed by Atlas Society Objectivists, would show other conservatives like nationalist conservatives more praise, approval, and consideration.
The nationalist conservatives definitely are not globalists and I would assume that Robert is not either, so they share that vision of current foreign policy, and avoiding immersion and entangelment in endless foreign wars.
I read in Wikipedia that there is a communitarian streak in nationalist conservative thinking, and this would likely offend Robert if an Objectivist favors individualism over collectivist solutions.
Perhaps his philosophical respect, for rationalism, Modernist idealism and the correct assumption that political and cultural consequences in outlook and behavior are downstream from foundational ideas and ideals, renders him leery of populist emphasis on sheer native customs, cultures, and practices at the expense of Objectivist promotion of its political and cultural objectives.
If the nationalist conservatives are anything like being Christian nationalists—I do not claim this—then an Objectivist secularist and atheist (most Objectivists do not believe in God) thinker like Robert might worry about Christian conservativism, but Craig Biddle, a few years ago, met with and discussed ideas with Dennis Prager at Prager’s house, so that would indicate to me that Christian conservatives, Jewish conservatives, nationalist conservatives, and secular conservatives like Objectivist should unite as much as they can, because they do share much in common, including a love of capitalism and America.
No comments:
Post a Comment