Explanations of the unique character of American political development—i.e., its exceptionalism—must consider and explain a wide range of phenomena. Why has the United States been relatively immune to the kinds of social movements and political parties commonly found in other industrialized democracies? Why is there no American Left? Why are American unions as politically weak and numerically insignificant as they are? Beyond parties and movements, we must also seek to understand the absence in the United States of the public goods that are commonly associated with the emergence of social democratic parties in other countries: comprehensive and redistributive policies in the areas of welfare, housing, education, and health care. Understanding these absences requires, in my view, that serious attention be paid to the ways in which race and certain ascriptive practices have shaped the development of the American nation.

In his classic study, The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz argued half a century ago, in the context of the cold war, that this American inability to imagine and engage the kinds of practices commonly endorsed in other developed nations could be explained by the tenacious grip of liberal ideas upon the American psyche. In his view, the country was founded by a cohort—a “fragment” to use his term—that was seeking to escape the repression of feudal Europe. The liberal ideas that defined this constituency, and specifically the values and principles associated with the work of the philosopher John Locke, absent Old World feudalism, would in Hartz's account make the citizens of the American polity resistant to any programs that might challenge individual freedoms (including religious liberty), social equality, and private property rights. As a result, Americans would tend to be suspicious of state activism and most regulatory and redistributive schemes as well as the attempts of elites to justify social hierarchies. Though hardly celebrating what he termed “irrational Lockean liberalism,” in his study, Hartz did not see racial exclusion or conflict as being central to the American story or as necessary components of a satisfactory explanation of the nation's exceptional evolution.

Despite the many charges that Hartz's approach does not pay sufficient attention to issues of race and ethnic conflict, and consequently that his explanation of the uniqueness of American political development is unconvincing, Phillip Abbott suggests that Hartz's analytical framework still offers “the most potent interpretation of American political thought.”¹

There are two ways of responding to Abbott's provocative claims. One can engage him on the terrain that he has staked out as a test case of the value of Hartz's analysis—the 1960s—or one can focus on the weaknesses of the thesis itself, the argument that American exceptionalism and political thought can best be understood as results of the pervasive and dominant influence of Lockean liberal commitments. I will try to do a bit of both here and suggest that Abbott and Hartz could do a better job of considering the influence of ascriptive traditions and practices upon American political thought and development. Furthermore, I suggest that if we are to understand American exceptionalism, we must investigate the relationship between rhetoric and practice.

Abbott suggests that the plausibility of the liberal society thesis rests upon its ability to answer three questions with regard to the significant decade of the 1960s: why protest emerged; why protest activities accelerated in scale of agenda and impact; and why the decade ended in a “contested stalemate.” Abbott argues that we should interpret the emergence of protest as the reflection of a process of “liberal enlightenment”; understand the pace of the New Frontier and Great Society projects as part and parcel of a push for “liberal reform” and a reflection of the contradictions faced by reform efforts in a Lockean environment; and read the stalemate that follows as a result of the reemergence of the “American democrat,” the broad, resentful class that resists identification with overambitious elites and is characteristically unsupportive of policy proposals that might challenge or undermine its Lockean commitments (to private property in particular). These terms are directly drawn from Hartz's work.

I offer a different interpretation of the events in question than Abbott develops. With regard to the first question, concerning why protest emerged as it did in the early 1960s, the point of departure for Abbott's (and Hartz's) reading of the possibilities offered by the decade is the cold war. “World involvement,” Hartz argued in The Liberal Tradition, might free the United States from “the peculiar limitations of its own perspective.”²

Increased engagement with the outside world dictated by post–World War II developments and subsequent animosities between the Soviet Union and the United States might compel development of a new “national self-awareness” and “cleanse America of both the ‘irrational Locke’ … and the remnants of reaction in the South” to use Abbott's language. Both are correct to posit that the cold war, by undermining the relative insularity of American foreign policy making, could bring about significant changes in the character of the American republic and its dominant discourse.

Using the same point of departure as Abbott and Hartz—the cold war—I would suggest, though, that the developments that occurred during the 1960s are best understood as a result of the ramifications of the civil rights movement, which occurred as it did and when it did because of circumstances created by the cold war. Competition between the United States and the Soviet Union after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine forced Americans to be much more image conscious than they had been in previous eras.³

With the growth of the media in terms of range (television, radio, print, and photo) and reach (worldwide), the activities of the civil rights movement were able to gain the federal government's attention much more quickly than was possible in previous eras. The United Nations provided a forum in which Jim Crow practices could be exposed, and the increasing number of independent nations populated by nonwhites constituted an attentive jury. In this context, the civil rights movement was able to advance its concerns more effectively and bring about rapid change over the course of the early 1960s (often, as is well known, without the support of state authorities). The challenge to Jim Crow generated a broader questioning of other status quos in the areas of ethnicity in general, gender, sexuality, and to a limited extent, class—and inspired movements often modeled on the civil rights movement. In other words, where Abbott and Hartz might emphasize the response of enlightened liberals to the new environment created by the cold war, I would stress the ways in which the cold war represented a context amenable to supporting successful challenges to American ascriptive practices and institutions. Where Abbott sees the work of liberal thought and inspiration, I would emphasize renewed struggle over racial exclusion as the relevant trigger (and note that Abbott's liberals reacted to, rather than led, the racial reform movement).

It is also important to observe that this is not the first instance of “liberal enlightenment” in American history provoked by external developments. The struggle for emancipation and abolition in the decades before the Civil War and attempts to “reconstruct” the country after the sectional strife were energized by the isolation of the United States from its nonslave counterparts in the 1850s and the moral appeals abolitionists were able to make to much of the rest of the world. After all, by this point, England, France, and Spain, having abandoned the practice of slavery at home and in their colonies, constituted a “moral cordon” of sorts surrounding the United States.

Abbott's second claim is that the Hartzian concept of “liberal reform” explains the pace of change in the 1960s and the dissonance between the rhetoric of the New Frontier and Great Society and the actual policy outcomes. Absent in Abbott's account is the role that sectionalism and political factors might have played in blunting reform intentions in the first half of the 1960s. The tensions between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the southern wing of the Democratic party, which exercised veto power in Congress in this period, need to be considered. Furthermore, the collision between rhetorical programs aimed at, and to some degree demanded by, northern audiences and the unstated desires to retain Democratic Party support in the South, should also be recognized.

Abbott's account of this period also relies too heavily on speeches and writings, and his choice of materials prevents him from understanding the real dynamics in play during the 1960s.⁴

The study of American exceptionalism must move beyond words and pronouncements to some more tangible empirical realm (e.g., the courts as studied by Rogers Smith, and public education as examined by Jennifer Hochschild).⁵ Abbott's discussion of the 1960s overlooks, for example, the ways in which welfare programs and recipients were increasingly demonized following the Great Society correction to the racial exclusions of the New Deal. This development was consistent with the general pattern that has emerged over the course of American (public policy) history: significant extensions of rights or services to include blacks and nonwhites have usually thrown the gears of American policy making into reverse (e.g., voting rights in the wake of the first Reconstruction; public housing; education; welfare policy; and the current deliberations regarding Social Security and health-care reform). The characteristic demonization of public policies, goods, and spaces—and the state itself—that follows attempts to include nonwhites as citizens is absent in Abbott's (and Hartz's) account. A comprehensive analysis of a particular political culture entails considering the connections and disjunctions between thought and practice—and some investigation of the salience of things not said, explained, or justified publicly.⁶ Public pronouncements can not be trusted to register intentional silences. The justifications for ascriptive practices are often unstated.

Finally, Abbott suggests that Hartz's concept of the “American democrat” can help us understand why the ambitions of the Great Society were thwarted. Absent, though, in Abbott's narrative is the degree to which resistance to the Great Society, while often superficially expressed in terms of maintaining order and property rights, was at heart a racial appeal.⁷

In his acknowledgment of the breadth of Nixon's “silent majority”—“workers, capitalists and bureaucrats”—Abbott does not consider the possibility that this “swollen class” has a racial cast to it (even, as he notes its “pervasive feelings of resentment” and its “determination to take power and rid [itself] of ‘others'”). With the benefit of four decades’ hindsight, we should also question Abbott's and Hartz's characterization of the white South as defeated. Exactly when were southern racial practices and their related conservatisms driven off into the American fantasyland? In 1865? 1964? 1968? 1980? 2000? 2004? The reading of the white South and its relationship to American liberalism offered by Hartz and Abbott does not reflect the reality that the South has been in many ways on the cutting edge of American politics if not the nation's political thought. Hence it is important to note, again, the power of things unsaid. In this light, we might recognize liberal rhetoric as an effect—as the necessary verbal wrapping, or perhaps residue—rather than a cause of American exceptionalism.

Let me turn now to my second task: explaining American exceptionalism and the plausibility of Hartz's thesis. I focus on the relationship between liberalism, as identified by Hartz and Abbott, and the ascriptive tradition.⁸

We should and must think of the supposedly dissonant trajectories of the liberal and ascriptive traditions as linked. This is the thrust of Edmund Morgan's work in American Slavery, American Freedom and Jennifer Hochschild's analysis in The New American Dilemma,⁹ in which she considers the possibility that racial and ascriptive practices in the United States might not be anomalous phenomena, but rather that there might be a symbiotic relationship between American liberal thought and American racist practices (a close reading of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America would yield similar conclusions). Following from Bonnie Honig's argument about democracy's need for the foreigner and Charles Taylor's reference to “the dynamic of exclusion in democracy,” one can imagine liberalism's need for the other and the compatibility of the liberal and ascriptive traditions, their dynamic interplay and perhaps, at least in the American context, their practical and effective identity.¹⁰ In other words, we can think of the liberal and ascriptive traditions as two faces of the same intentional and sentimental economy.

The evidence for this interpretation is easily available. Hartz's central figure, John Locke, used the language of slavery to criticize royal absolutism while he earned income from his investments in the Royal African Company and drafted feudal constitutions for the Carolinas that gave “every freeman … absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.”¹¹

The “radical” Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and spoke in fundamentally disparaging terms about their capacity and humanity while making powerful rhetorical arguments about the natural rights and liberties of citizens and the tyranny of the British. Woodrow Wilson's domestic and international liberalism has to be understood in tandem with his success in institutionalizing Jim Crow at home, his endorsement of the segregationist film The Birth of a Nation, and his efforts at Versailles to block incorporation of any racial equality language in the League of Nations constitution. American liberal rhetoric has been strident and extreme precisely because it has been launched in the context of racial and ascriptive hierarchies. (Consider, for example, the tensions within and between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.) Accordingly, in contrast to Hartz's explanation for “the speedy victory of manhood suffrage” in the Jacksonian era—“the inevitable frustration of elitist Whiggery in a liberal context”—the pressure during this period to align racial hierarchies clearly with distinctions between citizens and “others” should be cited.¹² In this light, also, we might reread James Morone's recent work on the moral resistance to institutionalizing comprehensive health care (and comprehensive and redistributive public goods in general) in the United States as another instance in which the fundamental inability to imagine “others” as fellow citizens and public good beneficiaries prevents the passage of progressive policy.¹³ At every turn in Morone's moral fable, an ascriptive judgment underlies the objection to republican solidarity. In this sense, Morone's moralism and Hartz's liberalism describe aspects of the contents of the American cocktail but miss the shape and texture of the glass—the racial and ethnic conflict.

Finally, I would like to put these American developments in a wider perspective. In The Founding of New Societies, which represents, among other things, an attempt to address some of the criticisms of The Liberal Tradition, Hartz suggests that “the European revolution out of which the [American] fragment arises does not know racial distinctions” and that “the European ideologies do not know race.”¹⁴

The supposition that Europe did not “know race” cannot be supported empirically. The advent of the modern was intimately linked to the early attempts to institutionalize racial and ascriptive hierarchies, and to the sentimental, philosophical, and economic imperatives associated with the initiation of the Atlantic slave trade.¹⁵ Locke was not the only product of that moment. The ascriptive foundations of the American and French revolutions were laid bare by the Haitian revolution when the attempts of slaves to use the language of liberty and equality to challenge their own subjugation were rejected and brutally opposed.¹⁶ In this context, articulations of citizenship have always depended upon the exclusion of constructed and ascribed others as non-nationals, second-class citizens, slaves, or fantastic apparitions. Unique to the American case is that it involved a significant internal population of others, Native Americans and imported Africans. This created the need for a clear distinction between the rights and obligations, and status, of “citizens,” and the situation of these various others. While opportunities for transcending this dynamic might present themselves in the future—and one might optimistically imagine the present moment as such a circumstance—up to this point it is the uniquely American and strangely coherent fusion of liberal thought and ascriptive practice that have defined the republic and marked its choices and evolution as exceptional.