The American story: Flawed and, yes, exceptional

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One of the less-noted divides in our divided country is over something called American exceptionalism. It’s not quite a left-right divide, but at times it comes close to that. Remember President Barack Obama’s response to a question concerning his thoughts on the subject? Yes, the president replied, he believes in American exceptionalism just as a Brit believes in British exceptionalism or a Greek believes in Greek exceptionalism. A perfect Obama response. Glib and flip. Right and wrong.

Of course, he was right that most everyone believes that one’s country is unique, maybe even exceptional, in some way. At the same time, Obama was also saying something much more directly dismissive. At best, he was declaring the question to be unimportant, even meaningless. At worst, he was implying that there was nothing truly exceptional about this country that was at all worth mentioning.

And yet perhaps Obama knew differently, especially since he and his fellow progressives have long been trying to steer the country away from its founding. Recall his words on the eve of his 2008 election when he told his cheering listeners that they were just days away from “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Hyperbole? To be sure. But there was a point to — and a goal behind — such fundamentally radical rhetoric.

So just what is exceptional about America that is at once under attack and also returns us to our founding? Answering that question brings us to James Madison, our constitutional drafter-in-chief.

Put simply, Madison sought to orchestrate the creation of an American republic that extended over a huge landmass. Conventional wisdom then held that representative government could only work over a small piece of territory, maybe even one that was no larger than a small town. Madison was determined to prove that wisdom wrong. He also believed that a true republic could only function — and last — if power was widely distributed and never overly centralized.

Then toss into this mix the only true invention of the founders, namely the electoral college. Election via this “college” was designed to assure that a president would have broad support throughout the country and not win the office by dominating one section of it by a huge vote margin.

Madison’s 10th Federalist and 51st Federalist papers best expressed his general thinking. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist No. 51. And “if angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

His 10th Federalist paper concerned the danger of factions and their threat to liberty. For Madison, liberty was to faction as air was to fire. Both were necessary for life, but each bodes potential trouble. Air assures the possibility of actual fire, while liberty can produce political fires of all sorts. After all, a free people will inevitably organize themselves into various interest groups (or “factions”), not all of which will always have either the common good or the good of republican government in mind.

How, then, can factions be kept under control without destroying liberty? Madison’s answer was paradoxical: Increase their number, thereby making it more difficult for a single faction, or even a coalition of factions, to gain permanent control.

So far, so good. But how to assure a sufficient number of competing factions? Simply increase the size of the country, thought Madison. As he saw it, the larger the territory, the greater the number of factions, thereby automatically reducing the prospect of dominance by a single faction or by a permanent alliance of factions.

This was the essence of Madison’s commitment to an informal system of checks and balances. Of course, Madison was also the father of the more formal system of dividing power, whether between the federal government and state governments, among state governments or between the two houses of Congress and among the three branches of government.

Why? Because Madison knew that this exceptional country was going to be populated with — and governed by — unexceptional people, that is to say those who were not “angels,” which is to say everyone. In other words, at the heart of American exceptionalism is the idea that a geographically immense country could only function as a true republic if power was never concentrated — and never permanently centralized.

That, in fact, has been the exceptional American story for much of our history. Moreover, it has never been the story of any other geographically immense country with great power ambitions. Think Russia and China. While largely a successful story, ours has never been flawless. But it has been exceptional.

For more than a century now, progressive forces have been gradually chipping away at this Madisonian design. Initially, this was a bipartisan effort. Think Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Today it is essentially a Democratic Party effort, notwithstanding their oft-stated goal of saving the American “democracy” that this republic was never intended to be.

The original progressive goal was to create a federal bureaucracy of apolitical experts. Today that bureaucracy, sometimes defined as the administrative state, has basically become an arm of the Democratic Party operating in league with forces much more powerful than Madison’s worrisome factions. Think Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the New York/Washington media empires. Then toss in the current campaign to subvert the intent of the electoral college by having states agree to surrender their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

While the early progressives were not out to “fundamentally transform” this country, today’s progressives are. Will they succeed? Who knows. But if they do, their challenge to the exceptional Madisonian design could produce a very different, even dangerous, result.

Once power is permanently centralized, Madison’s greatest worry could loom: secession, civil war or both. And there is nothing exceptional, much less hopeful or progressive, about a fundamental transformation of that sort.

Restoring the original American exceptionalism is not a pipe dream. Nor is it a leap into a long-gone past. If anything, it is a worthwhile goal, perhaps even an exceptional one. Achieving it will not be easy. But it makes much more sense to pursue this goal, rather than either blithely denying our exceptionalism or working to destroy it.

John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Bloomington.