In this campaign season, a lot of Republican candidates, particularly Newt Gingrich, have been talking about American Exceptionalism. When Gingrich says that President Obama doesn’t understand how exceptional the United States is, he means this in only a positive sense: that we are freer, more entrepreneurial, or have been a greater force for good in the world than other countries.
However, the late great sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, arguably the greatest authority on American exceptionalism, called it a “double-edged sword”: America was indeed exceptional in many of the positive senses Gingrich intended, but also exceptionally retrograde when compared to its developed-country peers. Thus, Lipset argued, American political culture was highly skeptical of government authority because of its origins in a revolt against British monarchical authority. This anti-authoritarian streak shows up in the career of Steve Jobs, who, as Walter Isaacson’s new biography chronicles, was able to found the most successful modern technology company precisely because he was something of a hippie who defied conventional wisdom in many aspects of his life. It also shows up, however, in high American crime rates: while the latter have gone up and down in the last 40 years, they have always tracked significantly higher than those in Europe, Canada, or Japan, particularly for violent crime. Both Jobs and the guy knocking over the neighborhood Seven-Eleven have something in common, an American disrespect for conventional authority.
Lipset argued that the American distrust of authority led the Founding Fathers to construct a political system with a huge number of checks and balances, precisely to make difficult strong government action. Federalism, the lack of disciplined parties, and the courts all constituted veto points. This explains the late and slow growth of the American state, or what Sam Huntington called the “Tudor” character of the American political system. The US government in the late 19th century looked a lot like what Ron Paul presumably hopes it will become again at some point: governance took place almost exclusively at a state and local level; the federal government consumed less than 5 percent of GDP (mostly post offices, customs houses, and an extremely small frontier army) and was a mass of patronage appointments controlled by the two political parties.
When Americans tried to construct the sort of modern, centralized bureaucratic state that already existed in much of Europe, they met with huge institutional and cultural resistance. It took twenty years to create a national railroad regulator, the Interstate Commerce Commission, in the face of opposition from states and the courts–and this despite the fact that a free market in railroads had produced economic chaos. Early social legislation was blocked by the courts, such as in the famous 1905 Lochner v. New York Supreme Court decision that invalidated the effort to regulate working hours. The cultural dimension of American exceptionalism was evident in the opposition of Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, to federally managed contributory pensions, at a moment when comparable labor leaders in Europe were pushing for precisely this kind of legislation.
Reading over this history, it’s remarkable how little the US has changed in the succeeding century. Prior to 2010, the US was the only developed democracy not to have in place some form of universal health insurance. As in the 1900s, not to mention the 1930s, expansion of these programs was denounced as “socialist” (leaving the United States as the only non-socialist rich country in the world). We will learn this summer whether the Supreme Court will replicate the Lochner precedent by invalidating Obamacare’s individual mandate. (I don’t think so, but who knows?)
The exceptional character of American state-building is related to the subject of my last post, namely, the quality of governance. Americans don’t want to expand the state because they have such low expectations for how it will deliver services. They fail to realize that the low quality of government is not intrinsic to bureaucracy per se, but to the multiple mandates and detailed rules imposed on the executive branch by Congress. I’m not hopeful we will get out of this conundrum anytime soon.