Seymour Martin lipset is as well equipped as anyone could be to answer the old question: is America special? The First New Nation provided one best-selling answer to that question some 20 years ago: an unequivocal yes. Both there, and in other books and essays since, he has elaborated the answer in the only way possible, by comparing American attitudes to politics, unions, welfare, violence, income distribution, individual responsibility and so on, with the attitudes of the British, the French, the Japanese, the Germans, and the Canadians. He uses many different surveys, but particularly two rounds of the World Values Survey in 1980 and the early 1990s; he comes up over and over again with the finding that on a spectrum that runs from individualism to collectivism, the US occupies the extreme individualist end of that spectrum, with Canada and Britain somewhat more collectivist, continental Europe a good deal more so, and Japan at the other extreme.
American Exceptionalism is rightly sub-titled "A Double-Edged Sword"; American individualism may partly account for American prosperity, but it also accounts for American criminality-for both lead the world. Sadly, its author's long standing interest in the subject turns out to be a double-edged sword too. The book is a compilation of old articles and reviews; it smells less of the midnight lamp than of the word processor's cut and paste utilities.
Nor is it obvious why a book on America includes a 50-page chapter on "Japanese Uniqueness" other than to use up an essay on Japan that Lipset is fond of. It adds nothing to the explanation of American exceptionalism. Nobody would expect the US to resemble, let us say, Cambodia, Fiji or Niger. Differences from Japan are not, therefore, intrinsically as interesting as differences from the societies that one would expect the US to resemble a lot more closely-the highly industrialised societies of western Europe and countries of the "white commonwealth" such as Australia and Canada.
But what we get from Lipset is not to be sneered at; he includes an interesting analysis of the attitudes of Jews, black Americans, and intellectuals. And like other writers in this field, Lipset struggles gallantly, if inconclusively, with the paradoxical fact that Americans are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the future of their country and the decay of its ethical foundations at a time when it has seen off the political challenge of the Soviet Union and the economic challenge of Japan, and remains the richest and most productive country in the world by a comfortable margin. Whether the paradox is dispelled as effectively as he supposes, by the observation that most of America's difficulties are the flip-side of America's successes, is another matter.
What does American exceptionalism amount to? As Lipset observes, the thought that "the American" was a new sort of person is as old as intelligent observation of American society. Hector St John de Crevecoeur beat de Tocqueville to the point by some 50 years when his Letters from an American Farmer pointed out that the American lexicon was "short in names of honour and words of dignity," and that Americans might be unequal in wealth, intelligence, and a great deal else, but thought of themselves as essentially one another's social equals. Edmund Burke tried to persuade the British parliament of the day not to drive the American colonies into rebellion, and reminded his colleagues that Americans were no longer Englishmen living in America, but members of a new and distinct form of society. Their vitality, ingenuity, imagination and energy were of a quite new order. Edmund Burke delivered a panegyric to the New England whalers who chased their gigantic prey from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and the pioneers who were pushing westwards across the mountains that hemmed in the colonies on the eastern seaboard.
It has for many years been a commonplace in social science that cultural attachments and social attitudes can persist for centuries, even in the face of enormous social, economic, and political change. Frenchmen voted in the 1940s in ways which reflected how village priests had reacted to the French Revolution 160 years earlier. Something of the sort must be true of the US if attitudes which seem similar to those of the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts are widely held in a society which by now has more inhabitants of German and of Irish descent than of English descent, and which has experienced waves of immigration from Catholic southern Europe, Jewish eastern Europe and from all over Asia and Latin America, into the bargain.
Lipset believes that the inhabitants of the US do indeed exhibit social and moral allegiances which reflect the outlook of their ancestors who made the American Revolution. Revolutionaries stayed in the US, while many Loyalists migrated to Canada; Canadians who sympathised with the revolutionaries followed the opposite path and went to the US. Lipset adopts the not uncommon view that Canada is thus in some fashion a "Tory-collectivist" society, while the US is equally deeply "individualist-Whig." The rest of the social outlook of their inhabitants is consistent with these basic allegiances. A Tory society is deferential, trusting of government, ready to accept hierarchy in return for the rulers of the society being willing to take responsibility for the welfare of their charges. An individualist Whig society thinks Jack is as good as his master, that we should all take responsibility for our own lives, and that governments have no business taking our income.
The peculiar mix of American political life thus can be seen to reflect the peculiar values of the American people. On the face of it, there seems something surprising about the fact that the country that was the first to establish real political democracy should be so backward in establishing a welfare state -the US is unique among advanced industrial societies in having no national health service and in leaving 40m people to manage without any health insurance at all. It has always seemed equally strange that the society which gave the poor the vote so much earlier than European countries has never had a serious socialist movement. At the high point of the socialist movement's success, Eugene Debs won 6 per cent of the vote in the 1912 presidential election. George Wallace won 12 per cent in 1968 and Ross Perot 19 per cent in 1992. Disaffected voters will vote for mavericks, but not for serious left wing candidates.
It is hardly surprising that the most frequently asked question about American exceptionalism after de Tocqueville's day was posed by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in his famous book: Why is there no Socialism in the United States? Lipset's answer is not unlike Sombart's. The socialist ideal, said Sombart, "was wrecked on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie." Americans who prospered in their individualistic ways had no cause to rewrite their views.
Neither Sombart nor Lipset reduces the issue to one of prosperity alone, however. Socialist allegiances have always been the outgrowth of political as well as economic conflicts. European socialist movements began as movements to demand universal suffrage. In the US, a first-past-the-post voting system, and entrenched parties almost from the birth of the republic, curtailed the opportunities for a labour party on the European model. It's not implausible to see the demands of the 19th and 20th century socialist movements as fuelled by a desire for respect, and for inclusion in the modern state as much as by more bread and butter concerns.
That takes Lipset back to the roots of the story. Why should Europeans look for respect from collective action, and why should they so readily see economic life as an arena of class struggle rather than one of individual advancement? Here Lipset is the child of de Tocqueville as to the beginnings of the process, and a 20th century industrial sociologist thereafter. A feudal society is hierarchical, collective, and status-bound. If working people are to rise in the world, it is plausible to think they must rise together or not at all. If they are to do that, it is plausible to think that they must seize control of the one instrument strong enough to combat the wealth and organisation of the already well off: the state.
That implies that conservative societies will produce a greater readiness to engage in collective action. If so, it is easier to organise trade unions, because the appropriate solidarity comes "naturally" to the workers who are to be organised. With a solid trade union base, a socialist party becomes a possibility. Paradoxically, it is conservative and hierarchical societies which produce both welfare states and socialist parties. On the one hand, conservatives set up welfare arrangements as a pre-emptive strike against the demands of workers' movements; on the other, their resistance to reform inspires radical workers' parties. In Bismarckian Germany, both things happened at once.
Perhaps the most intriguing chapters of the book are the ones on particular American groups. Lipset announces the not very surprising news that black Americans are notably more friendly towards affirmative action than are white Americans. More surprisingly, they hardly deviate from the rest of their fellow countrymen in their broad allegiance to individualistic, meritocratic, values-they are more hospitable to quotas than the white citizenry, but only slightly, and by a margin still very far from a majority.
Lipset can't help raising the obvious question: if there is such a convergence, why do so many people believe that the African-American plight is bad and getting worse, and that black Americans are chronically anti-social and morally disorganised? Lipset insists that the facts are at odds with appearances; far more black Americans are now earning middle class incomes than ever before. Not very many more teenagers have illegitimate babies than before-but the number of babies born inside black marriages has fallen dramatically. It is the collapse of the legitimate birth rate that explains why 68 per cent of black children are born outside wedlock. So why the panic?
One answer that Lipset canvasses is that the leaders of black advocacy groups have an interest in making out that things are pretty bad-for why else would Congress or the states help them out. Another answer is that the incomes and wealth of black Americans resemble those of white Americans: the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Things are indeed getting better for many more black Americans than before-and getting worse.
Other particular interests of Lipset's are Jews and intellectuals-two groups whose membership is partially overlapping, even if they are not quite as nearly identical as those of us who regard New York as the centre of the universe think. Lipset produces some rather astonishing figures: 45 per cent of "leading intellectuals" and 30 per cent of "professors at the major universities" do in fact come from a group that makes up barely 2.5 per cent of the population. The oddity of Jewish allegiances is that they are, simultaneously, squarely in the American mainstream-meritocratic and ambitious-and yet well to the left of that mainstream-in being egalitarian and concerned for underdogs both at home and internationally. In the 1992 presidential elections, Clinton took 80 per cent of the Jewish vote, while Perot and Bush shared a meagre 20 per cent between them.
What conclusions can one draw from Lipset's ragbag of a book? The most striking one is that Americans worry a great deal more than they have any reason to. If Lipset's broad conclusion is that Americans' moral allegiances have served them well for 250 years, his data suggest that his fellow citizens believe that the whole show is about to founder. In 1962, 75 per cent of Americans thought they could trust their government to solve pressing public problems; in 1984, the figure was 44 per cent; in 1994, 19 per cent. Still, that might betray only a traditional contempt for government. Sadly, Americans think their fellow citizens are pretty inadequate too. To the question of whether they were satisfied with the honesty of the American people, only 20 per cent said yes, while 78 per cent said no.
One obvious explanation of the way people can feel surrounded by criminals and governed by incompetents, even when they are on the whole safe and prosperous, lies in the television news, which feeds viewers a diet of theft and mayhem and the implication that government can do nothing to stop the horrors so depicted. Add in the chat shows which are really freak shows, and a population whose addiction to cheap religiosity suggests something about its capacity for critical thinking, and it becomes less surprising that an overwhelming majority of Americans say that their own lives are going very well, but they have the gravest doubts about the future.
American exceptionalism: A double-edged sword
Seymour Martin Lipset
WW Norton & Company ?19.95
