Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans are the least philosophical people, but also the most practical. This fits with our reputation for pragmatism, our unofficial public philosophy. But can we even claim to be pragmatists anymore? Quite independent of who occupies the White House, could Tocqueville still say we are the most practical people when nothing seems to be working?
One needn’t look to policy debates to see our difficulty. One sees the trouble set deep into the bonds of affection between friends and amidst family. A colleague of mine named 2016 the “Unfriend Me Now” election year. Our politics are becoming less practical and more philosophically demanding of friendships and families — the social glue of political community.
It’s not that no one crosses the aisle anymore. It’s that we have come to think of our life together not as series of pragmatic arrangements, but that our life together demands certain philosophic commitments that must guide our actions and constitute our friendships. Yet, becoming less practical and more philosophic isn’t making us happier.
Ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle argued that our actions should be ordered not by commitments to this or that aspect of our identity, but by the highest moral standard, to discipline our unbridled human passions so that our intellect can see the supreme good which will make us happy.
One can argue the Founding Fathers preserved a memory of this tradition by enshrining “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, not simply as an individual but also a communal endeavor. Tocqueville observed the way certain communities made distinct contributions to the American experiment without sharing philosophical and theological commitments with their neighbors.
Catholics, for example, Tocqueville observed, made for the most obedient but also the most independent citizens because of the transcendent standard they sought for their happiness. Dutch Reformed immigrants lived not only according to a different theological vision than their neighbors, but also according to different cultural standards.
There were real tensions, and violence sometimes erupted around these differences, but more often than not “it worked.” The bonds which held together all the particular traditions of American life were loose enough to accommodate real difference. Belief in “one nation, under God,” and a loosely held ecumenical creed, were sufficient to unite us in the American experiment in liberty.
Today, we have reversed the pattern with two philosophic visions of America, each demanding total control over every identity and every friendship. This is how the Left views the Right, and how the Right views the Left.
Former President Barack Obama sought to give the loose ecumenical creed that once bound us together a progressive definition, ever loosened from the past, ever pressing us forward into an unknown liberation. President Trump is smashing that attempt through a kind of “creative destruction.”
But the question of what holds us together remains central. All talk of borders and immigrants remains philosophically tied to this question of what constitutes the common good of America, and how do particular common goods relate to the highest good.
We may not be philosophical, as Tocqueville observed, but our political crisis is as philosophical as it gets.
C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate professor of Theology at The Catholic University of America, located in Washington, D.C.
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