the New Pantagruel

Revolutionary War, Revolutionary Peace?

by Kevin J. Jones

merica is divided. One hears this constantly either in the rhetoric of an opportunistic politician’s “Two Americas” stump speeches or in the petty dualisms created by journalists in search of a thesis, like the metrosexual/retrosexual split. And who can forget the Red State/Blue State rift that will be featured once again in our national election coverage? American demographics are bisected like so many green peppers in a Ginsu knife infomercial.

To reconcile these divisions, some have put forward the Declaration of Independence–specifically its second paragraph–as a source of national unity: in their eyes, the Declaration is a veritable kerygma of the American credo. Following Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, they view America as a nation fundamentally dedicated to a proposition. This advocacy of the “propositional nation,” with its attendant establishment of an American orthodoxy, echoes G.K. Chesterton’s cautionary description of the United States as “a nation with the soul of a church.” Whether or not one grants the position that America is primarily defined by the beliefs of her people, this means that the civil religion of the United States is likewise vulnerable to the political equivalent of the theological liberalism that has so weakened confessional religious discourse. It is not politically feasible to reinterpret the “articles of faith” of the American creed to mean mere articles of peace, as Samuel Johnson did with the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. For, as it happens, opposition to any traditional American understanding of political concepts takes a familiar form: the same words are affirmed, but not the same meaning. In view of such ambiguity, Claes G. Ryn’s recent book, America the Virtuous, has done us the great service of recovering traditional understandings of American politics and clarifying the revolutionary essence lurking beneath so many rhetorical invocations of American ideals.

Professor Ryn thinks that revolutionaries are indeed among us, and not only on the political left. In his view, the arguments found on the lips of many influential conservatives resemble not staples of traditional American rhetoric, but instead the tenets of the Jacobin ideology of the French Revolution. While emphasizing that he is delineating a tendency of thought and not necessarily a unified system with an established orthodoxy, Ryn sees certain characteristics as typical of the new strain of American opinion: (1) an “ideology of virtuous empire” that, rather than humbling American leaders, instead goads them on in reconstructing the world; (2) devotion to American principles in the abstract, which both downplays the importance of the “unwritten constitution” of the culture and encourages Americans to view their system of government as universally applicable; and finally, (3) a contempt for traditional societies not based on America-approved abstract principles. Partisans of this ideology of virtuous empire claim to be defending America and the West against postmodern and premodern nihilists, but by America and the West they mean not the concrete civilizations of history, but the philosophical abstractions such civilizations produced in the thought of the Enlightenment. Terms like “democracy” and “liberty,” are understood purely in the ideal sense, and not as the results of the interaction between particular culture and universal concepts. Nor is this outlook only limited to our foreign wars of revolution: the neo-Jacobin ideology, Ryn claims, “envisions the remaking not only of the world but of America.” (p. 8) He portrays this putative neo-Jacobinism as a movement that derives much of its energy from equivocation. Consciously or not, its adherents mask their new vision for both the United States and the world in the language of the American past.

Not surprisingly, America the Virtuous is a book set on exploring a split within American culture. To use the taxonomy of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, there is an Old America and a New America, that is to say, an older kind of conservatism and neo-Jacobin neoconservatism. Both assert that virtue, democracy, and the free market are to be desired, defended, and promoted. But Ryn argues that the interpretation of typical American values radically differs between the “old” Americans and the neo-Jacobins, with the latter in the ascendant.