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AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
MARCH 11, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
David Gergen engages Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of public policy at George Mason University and author of American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, about the dynamics of the American national character.
DAVID GERGEN: Marty, you've written a book about how and why America is different from many other industrialized countries, and you had an example that helped illustrate that I thought very well about the American experience, the Canadian experience. Twenty-five years ago, both governments announced to the people of their countries that they were going to move to the metric system. What happened, and what does that tell us about America?
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Oh, it's a wonderful example, I think. The, both countries, as you say, were told to go metric, to drop miles and inches and go to meters and
kilograms and the like, and after 15 years, both countries were supposed to be only metric. Well, you know, if you go to Canada, you see you can drive 100 an hour, that means kilometers, not miles. Canadians--and it's very simple--Canadians were told to go metric, and they did. Americans were told to go metric, and they didn't, you know, under identical, almost identical, conditions. And you know, Canadians respect the state, are obedient. They're the country in a counterrevolution, the country which preserved the monarchy. The United States is the country which overthrew the state and which is anti-statist and disobedient and, and much more lawless.
DAVID GERGEN: That's part of the American creed, that the values that came out of the American Revolutionary Period.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: And those values, essentially, as you describe them in the book, were those of liberty, egalitarianism, equality of opportunity, individualism, populism, laissez-faire--I think you identify the five values--
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Right. Those are the values.
DAVID GERGEN: That's right. But what I was struck by, I think a lot of us are familiar with the fact that these values grew out of the American Revolution but you, you argue in your book that it's more than the American Revolution, it's also the Protestant experience.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Yeah. Well, the two, I think, key things that affect our values are the Revolution and the institutions that flowed from it, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but also something which we rarely think about or realize. We are the only Protestant sectarian country in the world, i.e., the overwhelming majority of Americans belong to the Protestant sects, the Methodists, the Baptists, and the hundreds of others. European--Christianity in Europe, what religious sociologists call churches, as distinct from sects--the Catholics, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Orthodox--the churches are state-related. They were all state churches. They're hierarchical, and the relationship of the parishioner to the church is that he's supposed to be obedient. He's supposed to listen to the bishop and the priest and so on. American sectarians are congregational. The minister is an employee of the members, and the sectarianism requires that the members read the Bible, study the Bible, make their own decisions, and, and whatever they come to the conclusion is moral, they're morally obligated to, to do it. So we're a much more moralistic country.
DAVID GERGEN: More individualistic in the sense you make your own decisions--
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: --of what your own beliefs are. But once you've reached those, it, it also makes us more moralistic as well.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: I was interested in that. You know, if you see that in our politics, the flak we went through over the allegations about President Clinton and Jennifer Flowers back in his campaign, and you compare that to the picture of President Mitterrand's funeral in France--
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Where his mistress was present with his illegitimate daughter.
DAVID GERGEN: Right. Standing there next to his widow.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: And, and his children by his widow. And that was just part of what French culture was accepting.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: And it also flows, you know, continue in a sex-related area, abortion is a terrible issue with the United States, and it's moralistic and people on both sides feel it is a death issue, life and death issue, and we burn down abortion clinics, or some people do. Now, you can go to Rome, where the Pope sits, and get an abortion. Have you ever heard an abortion clinic being burnt in Rome or in Spain? Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Quebec has the lowest birth rate in North America. These are all Catholic areas, and you--and they--many-- most of these people are Catholics, go to church, but they don't--they don't get moralistic about the whole thing.
DAVID GERGEN: Because they, they have this system in which there's more obedience but there's also sense of perfectibility.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Right. The Church believes and the Christian churches in, in original sin, that human institutions and human beings are inherently imperfect.
DAVID GERGEN: And therefore, when they--and therefore when they sin, you shouldn't take it that seriously, because that's the way they are.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: Whereas the Protestant sects--
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Insist on perfection, on perfectibility, that you don't, that you don't sin, and, and, of course, the United States as a country has reflected this in all sorts of ways in its foreign policy. You know, we, we have--we don't recognize evil countries. We didn't recognize the Soviet Union for a long time, China. We still don't recognize Cuba, which is obvious. We just recognized Vietnam. Well, Franco recognized Cuba six months after Castro came to power, and he was hardly a Com Symp. DeGaulle and Churchill, both of whom come out of church religions, dealt with the Communists, dealt with the Russians, didn't have the same kind of feeling, because sure Russia was an evil country, but no country's good.
DAVID GERGEN: One of your central arguments, I wonder if you could explain it a bit more, is about the double sword quality of our values, that on one hand, our values seem to produce all this dynamism and the innovation and creativity that comes from an individualistic country, but you say there's a double-edge to that sword.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Yeah, because, you know, we're outliers. If you compare all the countries, developed countries, behavior, or the behavior attitude, we're at the extreme. But we're at the extreme in, in many good ways, and we're at the extreme in many bad ways. For example, crime rates, violence rates, whether we have--we have the largest crime rate. We have more people incarcerated. You know, we're a very large divorce rate, and I think the--we have the lowest rate of people voting, and I think these negative aspects are inter-linked with the positive ones. You know, I develop the argument in the book that they come out of the same kinds of things. For example, if you take crime, we place this great emphasis on opportunity, on getting ahead, and getting ahead regardless of social origin, regardless of family background. Well, that means if you don't get ahead, it's your fault, because we assume that this is an open society. Societies which come out of a feudal tradition, where there's more emphasis on inherited stratification family don't place the same feeling of failure, don't put the same onus of failure on individuals who don't get ahead. Hence, in a certain sense, one, the American society tells you to get ahead by hook or by crook and if you can't do it by hook, then do it--then you do it by crook.
DAVID GERGEN: Yeah. I understand the argument about why some of the bad trends we see in the society, the high divorce rates, the high crime rates and so forth, are inherently linked to the same values that produce all the dynamism in the country. What that doesn't explain for me is why some of these rates are getting so much worse.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Well, there I think one has to note that, and I think in almost all of them it's happening all over the Western world. It's not just--it's--and, and America has changed in all sorts of ways the way other countries have changed, where we've all moved from having once been overwhelmingly rural, small town societies, to metropolitan, complex societies, and high-tech societies. We all have increased immigration rates, and we all have--we're going through a technological revolution, which forces many people to change their jobs and social relations. All of these produce increased disruption, and since in our case, as in the Canadian case, or the German case, these negative features defeats the quality of a more--less stable society--are going on, so that--but these are not--I think there are very few of these which are uniquely American.
DAVID GERGEN: In looking for solutions, it was interesting to me what you seemed to be arguing was we should look for solutions that are consistent with our values, we should not try to go to become a communitarian sort of nation, a nation that tries to serve some of these things through group efforts, but, rather, you spoke of moral individualism.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Yeah. I think this is true, i.e., I think efforts to change us in directions which go against our--you know, the American creed--just won't work.
DAVID GERGEN: Yeah. So change is important, but don't try the metric system?
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: Okay. Fine. Thank you very much.
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Thank you.
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