A Country of the Future, Not the Past
The Autobiography of a Republic, Part 3
In the previous installment of my notes on Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, I covered his description of the arguments that drove the revolution as a “conceptualization of American life,” in which Americans found (as I put it) “the political ideas to match 150 years of prior experience.”
It struck me that this is a direct answer to the claim you hear from nationalist conservatives these days—a claim that has been implicit in American conservatism from the beginning—that “America is not an idea.”
In this view, America is not defined by a philosophical or political creed that is open to all but is instead defined by customs, traditions, and ultimately by some imagined original ethnic and racial composition.
In my criticism of this viewpoint, I offered the following argument.
In an 1818 letter, Adams argued that “the real American Revolution” was a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affection of the people,” and he specifically contrasted this to our traditions and customs.
The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise.
Thus, he recommends the project of “searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people and compose them into an independent nation.” He describes America’s national identity as being forged through a shared ideology.
The project recommended by Adams is, of course, exactly what Bailyn undertook, and it establishes the extent and nature of the philosophical influence on America in far more detail.
That is particularly the case in this book’s second chapter, “Sources and Traditions.” The title is pretty self-explanatory. Bailyn looks at the quotations and references in revolutionary-era pamphlets, as well as the ideas and even specific words and phrases that they drew from previous thinkers. These are very much not what today’s conservatives would have you believe.
Bailyn divides these influences into five categories.
