Books, Arts & Manners: Culture Vulture

PETER Brimelow deserves praise for going to the heart of the immigration issue, which is not about economics but about the nature of American nationality. There is a tendency among proponents of immigration to argue that America, unlike most other nations in the world, is built around a set of universalistic liberal ideas, and that it has no national identity beyond the Constitution and the system of law based on it. Brimelow argues, quite rightly, that no nation can be built in so abstract a manner. And the United States has not been the exception to this rule: it has always been a community with a common culture set by its dominant elites.

So far so good. But the question then becomes, What is the precise nature of that national identity and common culture? Here, it is possible to be much more precise than Mr. Brimelow. American culture comes from the Puritan sectarian religious heritage of the early Anglo-Saxon settlers, together with the Lockean-liberal ideology they had adopted by the eighteenth century. This alone explains America’s work ethic (traditionally and today much higher than that of England), its entrepreneurial and innovative character, its prudery and moralism, the high level of trust in its society, and in particular the strange and fortuitous coexistence of individualism and a powerful propensity for community (Tocqueville’s famous “art of association”).

PETER Brimelow deserves praise for going to the heart of the immigration issue, which is not about economics but about the nature of American nationality. There is a tendency among proponents of immigration to argue that America, unlike most other nations in the world, is built around a set of universalistic liberal ideas, and that it has no national identity beyond the Constitution and the system of law based on it. Brimelow argues, quite rightly, that no nation can be built in so abstract a manner. And the United States has not been the exception to this rule: it has always been a community with a common culture set by its dominant elites.

So far so good. But the question then becomes, What is the precise nature of that national identity and common culture? Here, it is possible to be much more precise than Mr. Brimelow. American culture comes from the Puritan sectarian religious heritage of the early Anglo-Saxon settlers, together with the Lockean-liberal ideology they had adopted by the eighteenth century. This alone explains America’s work ethic (traditionally and today much higher than that of England), its entrepreneurial and innovative character, its prudery and moralism, the high level of trust in its society, and in particular the strange and fortuitous coexistence of individualism and a powerful propensity for community (Tocqueville’s famous “art of association”).