Testing America

"Is America an Experiment?" by Wilfred M. McClay, in The Public Interest (Fall 1998), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 530, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Extreme multiculturalists, rejecting the beliefs or standards, but rather is a continuvery idea of a common American culture, ing "experiment." Their view reflects a misoften proclaim that this country has no fixed understanding of both America and experimentation, contends McClay, a Tulane University historian.

Experiment "is always related to some specific end, some well-defined goal, some truth, hypothesis, pattern, or principle to be confirmed or disconfirmed," he says, and effective scientific experimentation "always seeks to identify, understand, and harness the laws of nature, not transform or obliterate those laws." And in that sense, McClay observes, America at the outset was indeed an experiment. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, it "seemed to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."

By 1838, when Abraham Lincoln gave his celebrated address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, McClay argues, the results of the original American experiment were in. The government, Lincoln said, had been "felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now it is understood to be a successful one," having conclusively proved "the capability of a people to govern themselves." Twenty-five years later, at Gettysburg, he famously observed that the Civil War was "testing" whether the result of this successful experiment "can long endure."

Change is a constant, of course, and Americans have striven to have their nation live up more faithfully to its professed ideals, particularly with regard to the treatment of black Americans, McClay notes. "But the question is whether everything is therefore to be open to transformation. . . . It is one thing to argue that the experiment needs to be conducted more faithfully and quite another to say that it needs to be redefined or junked altogether." Indeed, he writes, love of country "is incompatible with the idea of America as an open-ended social experiment, an entity yet to be achieved, in which all options are open, all traditions subject to dissolution, and all claims revocable." In that case, only "the narcissistic self" finally matters.

The experiment of America is meaningless, McClay writes, "unless it is undertaken for the sake...of those convictions, beliefs, and fundamental commitments embodied in the term ‘ordered liberty.’ " The great challenge—the great experiment—today, he concludes, is to recover the "framework of meaning" in Western civilization that allowed those cherished ideals to flourish.