The American Political Tradition

"The American Political Tradition" — the title presumes we have one, and I do agree we do. Furthermore, I am not alone in that conviction. The progressive historian Richard Hofstadter identifies such in his landmark work of 1948, The American Political Tradition And the Men Who Made It. In his introduction he states, "there has been... a unity of cultural and political tradition, upon which American civilization has stood."¹ This paper emphasizes the latter (as does Hofstadter’s book), but I do commend to you a very nice work by Clarence B. Carson, whose book The American Tradition was published first in 1964 by the Foundation for Economic Education. Carson addresses a number of important cultural, as well as political characteristics that do, indeed, make us American. I agree with Hofstadter that the Founding Fathers knew what they were about when they founded this country and gave it a political economy based on the sanctity of private property; the philosophy of economic individualism; and maximum liberty, consistent with the rule of law.² I concur with Carson that the ordered liberty they established was perhaps the greatest achievement of mankind and that the reinvigoration of American tradition today is necessary to prevent us from going the way of Rome before another hundred years is through.³ The United States has the oldest fundamentally unchanged government in the history of the world. Our freedoms and our material wealth and achievements are the envy of the rest of the world. Unfortunately, knowledge about our history and form of government, about the political (and cultural) tradition we are blessed to inherit is at an all-time low. Today, as in 1787 outside the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, many a citizen should ask like the woman who asked Ben Franklin, "What is it [the Founders] have given us?" And today, the remnant who remember must sound it from the hills in the words Franklin used then, "A Republic, if you can keep it!" To that end, I offer the following explanation of five key elements in the American political tradition. They are:

1. the role of religion in politics—a brief look at a religious people and a religious sense of national mission;
2. the written Constitution, including its parameters and interpretive possibilities;
3. federalism, a system of dual sovereignty and vertical check and balance.
4. the republican ideological dialectic that gives us relatively narrow bounds to political discourse and which generally corresponds to original Federalist/Anti-Federalist and Federalist/Democratic-Republican debate.
5. political parties, as expressions of the ideological dialectic and vehicles for democratic participation.