What is Americanism?

Note: I apologize in advance for the length, but I hope you’ll agree it couldn’t have been done more briefly and the ideas justified it in this case.

Most people don’t really understand the nature of Americanism, America’s unique political philosophy. They might think America is mostly about giving people the vote or perhaps (historically) not having a king or even having a Constitution. But those are just byproducts of the underlying essence of Americanism: the suspicion of power. Americans (in any country) don’t necessarily believe that freedom on its own is always good, but they do believe that accumulations of power always lead to the loss of freedom and that is always bad. So Americans actively work to prevent concentrations of any form of power.

In government, this means parceling out political power very carefully through checks and balances and enumerated powers. It also means vesting such limited powers temporarily in the hands of representatives who can be unelected periodically by the voters who cast their ballots privately for the sake of preserving them against coercion. So, when it comes to lawmaking, power is carved up, deliberately partitioned, and spread across the most hands possible, ultimately the hands of every citizen. But this same concern about accumulated power is found elsewhere as well.

Freedom of the press is a bulwark against propaganda by the government, and it serves as a means of decentralizing information so that we can cast informed votes. But it also creates its own good in terms of keeping the power over ideas in as many hands as possible, as opposed to authoritarian systems where ideological power is amassed in one or a few places. And when information power starts to be concentrated too much in anyone’s hands (even if not a governmental entity), this starts to violate the anti-power-concentration impulse at the core of Americanism. Americanism requires a free press. But this means a lot of presses, not merely a handful of non-governmental ones.

Freedom of religion is another example, as is the right to keep and bear arms, both of which preserve the ability of individuals to protect themselves against forms of coercion: the theological and the physically violent. Any form of power is viewed with suspicion as a danger by Americans, and these are historically major forms of it.

But what about property rights and economic freedom? See, monarchy and feudalism went hand in hand because if the king made the laws and held all the political power, it only mad sense that (as a sort of demigod) he would also control all the land and wealth. Yet in America, it was no fluke at all that capitalism arose and flourished along with Constitutional republicanism precisely because capitalism is a truly radical pattern for decentralizing another major form of power: money. The ability of anyone to make transactions, own property, and engage in work for himself or for another means that no central agency can control this vital form of social power.

And yet, if the point is to keep power from being accumulated anywhere so as to preserve freedom for the individual everywhere, then we should very much be concerned about vast or at least disproportionate accumulations of wealth. Not because they show something nefarious was done to earn them (although this may well be so), but because we believe that the most likely thing people will do with such wealth is use it to distort the rest of the society (including political power) to their own benefit.

This is why, when it comes to money, Americans currently find themselves in a very dicey position. On the one hand, it is abundantly obvious that certain groups have amassed truly disparate wealth. They in turn have used this wealth to buy political influence in order to amplify their own economic and cultural position. This is true of the banking and finance industry, and it’s true of media moguls (who also obviously have information power as well). But it’s also true of corporations, labor unions, and senior citizens.

So when redistribution of wealth or financial regulation are proposed or the rich-poor gap lamented, freedom-lovers often mistakenly respond angrily as if government is being sought to deprive economic freedom. But people who truly understand Americanism don’t respond this way. Instead, they realize that economic redistribution (or at least some serious limits on the upper end of the income and wealth scale) aren’t instruments for remedying economic unfairness so much as means of preserving the freedom which vast accumulations of economic power necessarily jeopardize.

Thus, those who praise extreme deregulation as a purer form of freedom actually wind up enabling precisely the sort of economic tyranny which Americanism despises. The danger of a banking executive making $300 million a year when a bank teller makes only $30,000 isn’t just the absurdity of maintaining he is 10,000 times more valuable to society. It’s the real threat to the American doctrine that too much power in anyone’s hands is always a bad thing.

Socialism as an economic system of centralized planning is entirely contrary to Americanism. But financial regulation so as to prevent such accumulation isn’t socialism. It’s America’s truest ideals being played out against the very dangerous and historically obvious tyranny of the wealthy.