to civic solidarity and free and equal liberty under law – the country’s purported “Idea” or “Creed.”7 More broadly, Smith argued that Americans have long ascribed certain traits and characteristics to members of certain groups and groupings, whether identified by race, ethnicity, sex, or gender – that is, they have long made ascriptions based on identity. Those holding political, economic, social, and cultural power, in part via the privileging of their own (favored) ascriptive characteristics, have denied full (or even any) recognition to the members of those groups as civic equals on the basis of those ascribed characteristics. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most African-Americans were enslaved – treated as species of property. Native Americans were considered savages, to be, variously, Christianized and assimilated, removed, or exterminated. Women were, in many ways (via, for example, coverture laws) considered to have legally merged with their husbands, and could not vote. These exclusions were not only practiced and legally enforced but spoken of and justified openly and extensively in the public and private spheres. As such, Smith argued, it makes little sense to describe the American political thought tradition as exclusively liberal and republican, as if the principles which those frameworks purported to cherish were applied and invokable by all.
Both before and after Smith, however, some have pushed back against this understanding, insisting that “the American idea” or “creed” is real, and that these aberrational blots on the nation – even when they involved an overwhelming majority of the populace – are better conceived of not as evidence of the falseness of American claims to being a “creedal nation” but as a failure, slowly remedied across time, to live up to the noble and catechistic ideals on which the country had (genuinely) been founded.
Creedal nationalism defines Americanism not ascriptively but as a willingness to subscribe to a set of normatively desirable and foundational principles – in most iterations, liberty, equality, and democracy. “True” or “Real” Americanism – full civic membership – is defined by a willingness to fully commit oneself to – and perhaps even give one’s life to defend – such principles. In contradistinction to ascriptive Americanism, creedal nationalism promises an open and inviting form of civic membership – on display, for instance, each year when thousands of immigrants of diverse races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions take a solemn oath of American citizenship. Upon swearing the oath – professing fidelity not only to the country’s laws, but also to its catechistic creed – they are presumed as American as anyone else, even those whose ancestors have been living in the United States for generations: they join the American national community as full civic equals.
It may seem that, when compared with ethno-racial ascriptive or religious nationalism, creedal nationalism is inviting, inclusive, and egalitarian. But creedal nationalism has its own cast of outsiders: those who do not subscribe – or who are held by others to not subscribe – to the creed’s constitutive beliefs. Their beliefs – and, by extension, their persons – are classed as “anti-American,” or “un-American.” While these epithets would clearly be applied to those who expressly repudiate the polity’s creedal political principles, they have also been wielded against those – for example, socialists – whose political views, despite their protestations, are held by their opponents to have repudiated those principles. If their views are in the minority, their insistence that their views are consistent with the American creed, or even provide the best opportunity for its fullest realization, are likely to fall on deaf ears. As such, its apparent universalism notwithstanding, creedal nationalism can unleash its own forms of civic exclusion, and conduce to intellectual orthodoxy, conformism, and a reluctance to express political disagreement or dissent for fear of being labeled a traitor.
Two of the most emblematic statements of American creedalism were made by outside observers of US political culture, the French aristocrat and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987). Both are at once celebrations and critiques.
De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) has been widely adopted by Americans as a seminal text of American creedalism. Tocqueville was part of a flotilla of European visitors who came to the Jacksonian United States to observe and reflect upon the extraordinary spectacle of a country in which the constituent people, the demos, were their own rulers. Democracy in America is an engaging mixture of dispassionate observation, sociological description and reportage, analytical-philosophical reflection, and normative evaluation and assessment – much of which was speculative, provisional, and prognosticative. An early social scientist in the modern sense, Tocqueville observed that Americans professed certain principles of political thought and, moreover, that, in some ways, they lived, or sought to live, by the lights of those principles. Tocqueville then went out and observed what Americans actually did and said, and identified patterns. He additionally observed the ways that key institutions of American life functioned. Tocqueville then stepped back to consider both the present and future implications of their dynamics. Where he saw problems, he considered the possibility that other dynamics and institutions might offer potential remedies, or at least mitigations.
Tocqueville’s observations – about the role of women and religion, about lawyers, about New England township government, and innumerable other aspects of American life as he observed it – and his often prescient analysis of their implications, are too extensive to canvass here. But one preoccupation of his is worth setting out: his extended consideration of the implications of what he took to be the pervasive American belief in (democratic) equality – for which, it is worth underlining, his point of comparison, his yardstick, was not an abstract ideal (or, for that matter, twenty-first-century standards) but contemporaneous Western Europe. Tocqueville was attracted by the trend toward equality he saw in America. He thought it boded well for the future of liberal freedom in the world. At the same time, however, he tempered his celebration with reservations and concerns. The faith of Americans in democracy and equality threatened traditional understandings of hierarchy and authority, many of which had long undergirded much of the peace, good order, manners, and mores of western societies, and their core institutions like families and churches. Throughout history, most people had taken their basic opinions and understandings from hierarchical authority and traditions. What might happen, Tocqueville wondered, as the commitment to democracy and equality, with the critiques they entail of hierarchy, tradition, and authority, unspooled to reach new and previously unimagined destinations?
Tocqueville pondered, and speculated. He expressed concern about the emergence of a “tyranny of the majority.” In the absence of the traditional sources of authority and hierarchies in a democracy, the people, he predicted, would increasingly take their opinions from what those around them were thinking. As such, he posited that democratic America’s ironic fate might be that its thorough-going individualism might end, paradoxically, in a stultifying conformism: while everyone would ostensibly be free to think and do as they pleased, most would end up thinking and doing what everyone else was. The country’s loudly professed commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of thought would end up, Tocqueville ventured, with very little freedom of opinion.
Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944) was a landmark study commissioned by the New York-based Carnegie Corporation that influenced the American civil rights movement and public thinking about civil rights more generally. In that two-volume report, Myrdal posited an “American Creed” that largely reflected liberal values of liberty, equality, and justice for all – which he took to be widespread among Americans, and sincerely held. That said, Myrdal argued that, in key respects, chiefly with regard to race, the country had as yet failed to live up to its creedal ideals, (Similar views had long been expressed, in diverse ways, by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the feminist framers of the Seneca Falls Declaration on Women’s Rights, and other “aspirationalists” – and, for that matter, by “declinists,” who focused on corruptions and fallings away.)
Critical race theorists and Rogers Smith have taken exception to Myrdal’s framing. The commitment to ascribed identities, they have argued, had always been constitutive of the nation’s laws, practices, and self-understandings. Put otherwise,
