Very briefly, I urge you to read Razib Khan’s fascinating post on “the Anglo Revolutions.” Understanding the U.S. policy landscape requires an appreciation of American distinctiveness, and how we misunderstand it. I shy away from the idea of American exceptionalism, mainly because I see the U.S. as part of larger group of settler societies, and not just Anglophone settler societies. Seymour Martin Lipset’s pioneering work on the failures of the U.S. labor movement drew heavily on the comparison with Canada, where a socialist party has been a vital part of political life for a century. Yet one can also make fruitful comparisons with Australia and also Brazil and Argentina, among others. Understood as a polyethnic, multiracial, continental-scale settler society, the regional diversity and institutional particularities of the U.S. make more sense than if we see our country as an outlier from an essentially European norm.

Razib riffs on this and much more:

Certainly the American founders would have been understood to be racist today, but as outlined in works such as What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, the reality is that anexplicitly race-based republic crystallized in the first half the 19th century in North America with the rise of democratic populism. As states removed property qualifications for voting, they enacted racial bars which had not existed prior. It is an interesting comment on the complexity of changing norms in this period that Martin van Buren’s vice president, Richard Mentor Johnson, was known to have had a common-in-law wife who was mixed-race (and two daughters by her whom he acknowledged). Van Buren’s Democratic party was the primary driver of “white male suffrage,” which expanded voting rights to those males who were without means, but barred voting rights in many states from non-whites. It helped transform the self-conception of the American republic to that of the American democracy.
These two dynamics, the broadening of suffrage to most American males, combined with a more explicit and legally sanctioned commitment to white supremacy, causes interpretive tensions for 20th century American liberal historians. This seems clear in works such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, which attempted to trace American liberalism back to this period. So it is somewhat uncomfortable for him that it was among some of the older aristocratic conservative Federalists that one could find objection to a binary republic where color was one’s passport to equality. This is not because the conservatives favored racial equality as such, but rather preferred a more complex hierarchy and a set of values which included race, class, education and breeding, as the judge of a man. Such old republic conservatives may not have accepted a black man as an equal on the grounds of race, but they may not have acceded to the contention that all white men were superior in nature to all black men.

Razib blends his interests in science and culture in endlessly stimulating ways. Definitely check out his blog.

Also check out his thoughts on “second-tier lingua francas,” and consider how it might have impacted the rise of Islamic extremism in what had been the syncretic, polyglot cultures of South and Southeast Asia.