American Political Culture

The purpose of this research is to examine the roots of American political culture. The plan of the research will be to set forth a foundational review of the American political system and then to discuss the role of values that are held to be either uniquely or originally American, as well as how such values were elaborated over the course of the evolution of the American political system in the first century after the founding generation, with a view toward assessing the resilience and stability of the values informing the American system of governance.

What must be understood first of all about American political values as far as the founding of the country is concerned is that they were articulated on the record, by educated and literate political actors whose understanding of political processes had been informed by Western political history. That explains the "documentary" provenance of the US political institutions, notably configured in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Underpinning the Constitution is another document, or more exactly set of documents, bearing the title The Federalist Papers.

As Kesler points out in his introduction to The Federalist Papers (1999, p. xii-xiii), when the newly sovereign United States of America found that the Articles of Confederation, the first formula for American national government, could not effectively achieve the goals of nationhood, a constitutional convention was called that was desi

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were, of course, fundamental problems with American political culture from its inception: Negro slavery and the developing war against Native Americans. The former was addressed only by the Civil War, and the latter in many respects remains an intractable feature of American political culture to the present day. Indeed, only after the Progressive Era, by which time the Native Americans had been essentialized and essentially suppressed by the dominant culture and the nationalist political hegemon, did discourse of Native Americans even begin to reach much nuance beyond that of conquest. The enthusiasm of much contemporaneous discourse in the US in the decades just after ratification of the Constitution tended to obscure the slavery issue, which was evolving along its own track, separate from democratic/republican triumphalism. That is demonstrated by the commentaries of Alexis de Tocqueville. By the time his Democracy in America appeared in 1835, the political and social institutions that are familiar American structures today were in place, but the "peculiar institution" of Southern slavery had another 30 years to run. Nevertheless, Tocqueville seems to have been determined to teach Europeans in general and the French in particul

Category: Government - A