Bringing Ideals Down to Earth
If Anne-Marie Slaughter jolts us out of the smugness with which we tout American ideals, she will have done a great public service. The danger is that America trumpets its ideals from within a rhetorical echo chamber. Credibility is one problem; relevance and connection to day-to-day realities is another. The rhetoric of the American mission must be put on a low-sanctimony diet.
Dean Slaughter reminds us that ideals give a broad outline as often as (or more than) they point down the straight and narrow path. In a sense, keeping faith with American values is an existential challenge. Not the kind of dire “existential threat” that the national security apparatus is geared toward thwarting, but the struggle over practicalities and trade-offs required in trying to genuinely live out our ideals, just as Anne-Marie says.
As the US works to get our foreign policy on track and gain some humility, it will take all the things the author highlights: wrestling with ambiguities, setting our house in order, and delving into other cultures. But if we take seriously the difficulties of putting ideals into practice, this must also be reflected broadly in how we hold and present our ideals.
I’m afraid too much of the rhetoric of American ideals goes into the category of liking the sounds of our own voices. We don’t inspire so much as we exasperate. Our campaign in the global battle of ideas has come to sound like windy July 4 oratory (think River City Mayor Shinn, gearing up the Gettysburg Address in “The Music Man”).
We certainly have a lot to offer the world, and we indeed wouldn’t be America if we didn’t believe in that mission, as the author reminds us. The current challenge is to bring these ideals down to earth, with all its beautiful messiness, and make sure they offer meaningful progress for people’s lives.
Ideals are all good and fine, but how about some american common sense, and the inherent healthy distrust of assumed authority that seems to want to make common cause with foreign royalty, and lighten up your wallet on the way by? How about less B.S., and more public accountability in government? How about less people riding the entitlement gravy train to their graves, and more people running their own businesses? How about more people being visibly seen to break a sweat on a regular basis in pursuit of an honest buck? You want an american ideal? How about a return to honesty....screw the ivory tower, give me people that pay their bills every month, work a full-time job, and don't steal from their friends, family, and neighbors...or from their employers. Let's see, how about another ideal: a voting public with the moxy to pull off recall elections when it's found that their representatives have gotten greedy, or otherwise broken with the public trust bestowed upon them...or, here's another, independence, candidates for public office and business leaders that want people to be able to live independently, instead of taxing them to the eyeballs and expecting americans to pay the bills and solve the problems of half of the rest of the planet with their car-lot-grade rhetoric.
Ooh, yeah, let's REALLY get idealistic, and have diplomats and whatnot that tell these basket-case countries to get busy, and pull their socks up, if they ever expect any kind of assistance, let alone the privilege of doing commerce with the United States. That'd be an I-deal...
June 19, 2007 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think it's even more fundamental than that. Defining American values is an existential challenge. The faith we seek is that we can define ourselves without having to explain at every step how truly excellent and wonderful our values are.
American exceptionalism should speak for itself. When we go round selling it - Karen Hughes, anyone? - that's when we've got big problems.
June 19, 2007 10:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Even if Americans can claim these ideals, none of them are uniquely American nor did they originate in America. We refined some of them and helped spread some of them, but we've restricted ourselves to a set of values that don't even include all the values in the Declaration of Human Rights like a universal right to health care.
June 19, 2007 4:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
The "Music Man" reference is EXTREMELY apt. The US's genius for hucksterism and self-promotion lies near the core of our national character, along with all the other, better stuff. Our loud braying of our ideals has come to be linked, in foreign eyes, with our tendency to show up selling a bill of goods, make a mess of things, and skip town. At this stage, the world would really like the US to start behaving like a decent, normal country again.
Accumulating Peripherals
June 19, 2007 6:40 PM | Reply | Permalink