American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History,
by Charles Murray, AEI Press, 59 pages, $3.95.

Is the United States unlike any other nation in history? This
may seem to be a simple question open to a straightforward answer
reached with the help of comparative history, political theory,
economics, and sociology. But American exceptionalism is rarely the
stuff of dispassionate academic discourse. It has become wedded to
modern nationalism. Politicians and journalists, Republicans and
Democrats alike, invoke it as a creedal affirmation endorsing a
range of American domestic and foreign policy agendas.

Charles Murray, author most recently of
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010,
enters the debate with American Exceptionalism, a modest
booklet published by the American Enterprise Institute. The idea of
exceptionalism, Murray argues, once enjoyed a broad consensus and
helped unite Americans around what Lincoln called their “political
religion.” Astute European visitors, such as the celebrated Alexis
de Tocqueville and the lesser-known Francis Grund, witnessed
America’s unprecedented achievements and through their books
reinforced the young nation’s powerful self-conception. But
recently that faith in “exceptionalism has eroded,” and Murray
calls on its champions to defend it from its critics at home and
abroad. A creed that was once nearly universally embraced has
become a minority affirmation. Murray ends by asking his readers to
decide if they are happy with what has happened to exceptionalism
and to reflect seriously on their duty to America and their vision
for the nation’s future. His hope seems to be that a reclaimed
exceptionalism is critical to national self-knowledge and right
conduct.

Murray’s version of exceptionalism is fairly simple. Seizing
their moment and opportunity, he writes, the Founders laid out a
blueprint for the American experiment, including republicanism, a
chief executive elected for a limited term, a written constitution,
and the transformation of “an ideology of individual liberty into a
governing creed.” The nation launched in 1789 flourished in the
century ahead sustained by a number of blessings: America’s
geographic remoteness from Europe’s turmoil; her abundance of land;
her commitment to natural rights and individualism; her citizens’
“industriousness, egalitarianism, [and] religiosity, and an amalgam
of philanthropy and volunteerism” in their communities; and the
nineteenth century’s doctrines of economic and political
liberalism, which Murray identifies as his own tradition and as
“the founding ideology of the nation.”

Murray leaves no doubt
how radically new the novus ordo seclorum was in his
judgment. He emphasizes the republic’s break with the past, its
“unprecedented” and “unparalleled” achievement. America in 1789 was
“an experiment in governance unlike any in the history of the
world,” he writes, and the Founders “invented a new nation from
scratch.”

While there were no doubt features of America that managed this
escape from history in ways Americans recognized, boasted about,
and wished to preserve, Murray’s preoccupation with innovation
ignores more than a century of colonial America’s prior experience
in self-government and constitutionalism and its acknowledged debt
to ancient, European, and most of all English political theory and
practice. It is hard to recognize historical reality in Murray’s
depiction of America’s past. America was not sui generis;
it was a variation on themes reaching back thousands of years. The
republic did not emerge de novo in the New World; it
altered—to use the word the Declaration of Independence chose—an
existing form of government while announcing the more general right
of a people to abolish their government.

Murray complains at one point about “both liberals and
conservatives quoting snippets of [the Founders’] writings” to
endorse their own views. But Murray’s own snippets are vulnerable
to the same charge. He uses an 1825 letter from Thomas Jefferson to
Henry Lee, for instance, to show that after 50 years of reflection
Jefferson called the rights language of the Declaration “an
expression of the American mind.” If this is true, it comports
nicely with Murray’s claim that America transformed an ideology of
natural rights into an enduring political creed. But Jefferson’s
letter never makes this connection. In fact, the full text of
Jefferson’s letter makes a hash out of Murray’s insistence on an
America made “from scratch.” The “object of the Declaration of
Independence,” Jefferson told Lee, was “not to find new principles,
or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things
which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the
common sense of the subject.” He continued: “Neither aiming at
originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any
particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an
expression of the American mind.” And he then cited “Aristotle,
Cicero, Locke, Sidney, c.” This letter may not prove a
counter-argument against Murray’s claims, but it certainly doesn’t
support them. Jefferson did mention “our rights,” but the letter
can hardly be appropriated for the idea of an America without
precedent.

Reflecting on his visit to the Untied States in the 1830s,
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of his repeated encounters with
Americans’ fussy “national pride.” “In their relations with
foreigners,” he sighed, “Americans seem irritated by the slightest
criticism and appear greedy for praise. The flimsiest compliment
pleases them and the most fulsome rarely manages to satisfy them;
they plague you constantly to make you praise them and, if you show
yourself reluctant, they praise themselves. Doubting their own
worth, they could be said to need a constant illustration of it
before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy, it is also
restless and jealous.”

On a return visit, Tocqueville would find 21st century Americans
still seeking flattery from others and flattering themselves. This
appetite for praise was not a credit to the American character in
the 1830s. Nor is it now. Our preoccupation with being exceptional,
with figuring out just how exceptional we are, and then constantly
reminding ourselves and insisting to the world on the indubitable
truth of that exceptionalism is not attractive. Like all vanity, it
impedes self-knowledge. And it forgets its indebtedness to the
past.

Charles Murray’s version of American exceptionalism is more
cautious than most and his claims fairly circumspect compared to
others. But they are still part of an odd national pastime, one we
might have expected Americans to have outgrown by now, much as
adults learn somewhere along the way not to talk about themselves
and their achievements. A modest America would work hard to protect
and perpetuate its achievements, but it would talk about something
else.