Smith’s 1992 article attacks Hartz’s liberal consensus thesis while positioning it as the most recent expression of a lineage stretching back to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
First, he argues that the “Tocquevillian story” "fail[s] to give due weight to inegalitarian ideologies and conditions that have shaped the participants and the substance of American politics just as deeply" as liberalism has (549). It is deceptive because too narrow, “centered on relationships among a minority of Americans (white men, largely of northern European ancestry)” (549). At the republic’s founding, the “comparative moral, material, and political egalitarianism that prevailed . . . among moderately propertied white men was surrounded by an array of other fixed, ascriptive systems of unequal status, all largely unchallenged by the American revolutionaries (549). And for “at least two-thirds of American history, the majority of the domestic adult population was . . . ineligible for full American citizenship solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender” (549).
Moreover, “American intellectual and political elites elaborated distinctive justifications for these ascriptive systems, . . .[identifying] the true meaning of Americanism with particular forms of cultural, religious, ethnic, and especially racial and gender hierarchies. And these "have obviously aided those who sat atop the nation's political, economic, and social hierarchies" (550).
Second, Smith argues that these “conventional narratives” of American political identity “fail to explain how and why liberalizing efforts have frequently lost to forces favoring new forms of racial and gender hierarchy” (550). Indeed he ends the article by drawing a partial parallel between present day efforts to undo the civil rights reforms of the 1960s and 1970s and the establishment of Southern apartheid after the collapse of the post-Civil War Reconstruction policies (563).
Third, Smith finds fault with how Hartz and other proponents of American exceptionalism have employed comparisons between the United States and Europe. The much touted absence from America of specifically European forms of class oppression serves to mask the types of oppression prevalent in America, thus enabling the egalitarianism of American society to be greatly exaggerated.
Fourth, Smith argues that today, Tocquevillian arguments "still provide the deep structure" for many social scientists, including some who are highly critical of the failure of American society to abide by its liberal values.
As an alternative to this “orthodoxy on American identity,” Smith proposes that multiple traditions have and continue to shape American civic identity. "American politics is best seen as expressing the interaction of multiple political traditions, including liberalism, republicanism, and ascriptive forms of Americanism, which have collectively comprised American political culture, without any constituting it as a whole" (p550).
The multiple traditions thesis can be summarized in four points:
A second perspective on Smith can be appended to this. While Smith insists that ascriptive Americanism is just as indigenous as liberalism, he clearly regards liberalism as American culture’s “better half.” Hartz sought to banish non-liberal indigenous beliefs to a netherworld: they were in America, but not of America. Smith rejects this Hartzian strategy as a grotesque masquerade. With it must go the mythology of a liberal birth. “[C]olonial British Americans”, Smith points out, “pursued practices of racial and gender domination long before they embraced the types of liberal republican ideologies and institutions that came to play prominent roles in America” (556). Liberal values, then, cannot be regarded as elements of a sacred covenant made at the nation’s founding, nor can they be taken for granted as forming the ethical standard governing its public life. It is more than a little ironic that Smith, writing at the moment of American triumph at the end of the Cold War, declares the historic hegemony of liberalism in America to have been little more than a delusion. Moreover, in spoiling the celebration and in rejecting any faith in the ethical progressivity of history, Smith opens up a deeper problem, one not dealt with in this article. When he speaks of “multiple traditions,” he means fundamental conflict. And when he renounces any faith in the ethical progressivity of history, he adopts the late-modern or postmodern position that views human existence as radically contingent. Yet his personal belief in the desirability of living in a society governed by liberal values seems so untouched by doubt that it itself retains a kind of religious aura. He is speaking of what is, ultimately, a kind of religious struggle.
If, in this struggle, the pagans are those who, like Pat Buchanan and David Duke, espouse ascriptive Americanism, the heretics are radicals of the left. Notice that Smith’s multiple traditions do not include socialism. Notice too that he assimilates republicanism to liberalism, even while acknowledging in a footnote that they are distinct ideologies. And finally, in highlighting the “acceptance of ascriptive inegalitarian beliefs by brilliant and politically dissident female and black male intellectuals,” Smith attacks the credibility and cohesiveness of a radical democratic tradition in American politics, while at the same time trying to claim its mantle for the liberal ideal.
Foner’s article intersects the concerns of Hartz and Smith at several points. For Hartz, after all, the absence of socialism is the flip side of the hegemony of liberal values--hence this question (“Why is there no socialism in the United States) is the other side of the thesis of a cultural consensus on liberal values. But where Hartz strives to explain this as the distinctive feature of American political culture, Foner disputes both the degree to which liberal values actually predominated and the claim that America has been, on this account, an exception to the European norm.
Foner argues for the persistence in America of an indigenous radicalism based on radical republicanism and on a conception of Protestant ethics requiring the pursuit of social justice. He also highlights the real influence that socialist ideas and parties had at certain times in American history. Beyond this, however, Foner undercuts the thesis of American exceptionalism in a different, and, if you’re a socialist, perhaps a gloomier way.
Near the beginning he suggests that “It might well be worth raising at the outset the question whether the experience of socialism in the United States is, in reality, exceptional, or whether it represents an extreme example of the dilemma of socialism throughout western society” (58), and in his conclusion he points out that the so-called European socialist parties are actually social democratic parties pursuing reforms within the framework of capitalism. Thus, Europe also lacks revolutionary socialist parties. In other words, to the question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?,” his final response is, “Why is there no socialism in Europe?”
What about Foner’s relationship to Smith? Both criticize the consensus interpretation of American politics and the exceptionalist thesis. Beyond this, they part company. Smith emphasizes the influence of racism, sexism, nativism and other illiberal currents in American history while ignoring the socialist tradition and undercutting the radical democratic one.
Foner, in contrast, finds in the durability of an indigenous radical tradition an explanation for the socialism’s lack of appeal:
“Not the absence of non-liberal ideas, but the persistence of a radical vision resting on small property inhibited the rise of socialist ideologies. . . . According to Nick Salvatore, American socialists like Eugene V. Debs viewed corporate capitalism, not socialism, as the revolutionary force in American life, disrupting local communities, undermining the ideal of the independent citizen, and introducing class divisions into a previously homogenous social order” (63). And he mentions that “The ideologies of nineteenth-century labor and farmers’ movements, and even early twentieth-century socialism itself, owed more to traditional republican notions of the equal citizen and the independent small producer, than to coherent analysis of class-divided society” (63).
Is Foner, then, speaking as a socialist critic of this indigenous streak of radicalism? After all, near the end of the article he pointedly affirms his Marxist convictions:
“In the end, of course, 'why is there no socialism' rests upon an interpretation of history that accords socialism a privileged position among radical movements because it arises inexorably out of the inner logic of capitalist development, and holds out the promise of a far-reaching social revolution. To the Marxist paradigm that underlies this vision, I have no objection” (74).
Moreover, socialism emphasizes class over national identity: one is a worker first, then an American. And consistent with this, Foner praises the American Socialist party for its principled opposition to US entrance into WWI. Hence he may indeed regard indigenous radicalisms as ultimately an unfortunate deflection of working Americans from the path of liberation.
If we combine Foner and Smith into a single typology of American politics, we arrive at an expanded notion of “multiple traditions”: liberalism, ascriptive Americanism, radical republicanism, socialism. Do these encompass all the traditions which have significantly shaped American political culture? Or do we encounter in both authors a similar rhetorical strategy: the organization of American history around the absence of a particular ideal: liberalism for Smith, socialism for Foner?
Read the three articles in the section on "America Imagined, America Conquered."
In addition, read the selections from The Debate on the Constitution listed under the first three headings: