America's Ambiguous Soul

A nation that could drink "near beer" during Prohibition and fight a "quasi-war" with France is unlikely to be fastidious about absolutes. Alexis de Tocqueville, sharp-eyed visitor to Jacksonian America, thought ambiguity was a peculiarly American style, reflecting a certain restlessness and love of novelty, the fear of getting stuck in a rut he noticed on his travels. Americans preferred to leave language open, as one would leave a door or a window open, to make a quick exit when prudence dictated. Ambiguity is a device for finding options and exits. second thoughts and on the fly decisions. It is an enabler of democracy. It haunts the US Constitution. One historian calls the text's loose wording the saving "lubricant," that greased the joints of that eighteenth century masterpiece. Yet inexactitude can also be pernicious. It has been held responsible for the Civil War, the Great Depression and the hypertrophy of the powers of the modern American presidency. In today's contentious and polarized politics, its intensely pluralistic society, ambiguity is more in vogue than ever. It tends to dilute antagonisms and ideological fixity. This book discovers it in unexpected places, recruited for surprising reasons, part of American exceptionalism's exceptional genius for compromise. Often, it is not a pretty story. Notorious is Congress's habit of weasel-wording legislation to muffle its effect on sensitive sections of the electorate, then leaving the Supreme Court to disambiguate the language. Critics have also accused the Court of handing down "fat and flabby" opinions, motivated by an over-eager desire to find an elusive consensus among the justices. Morality is growing indistinct. Sins that used to be clear-cut, Biblically prohibited and universally deplored, are now unstable and hard to pin down. Racism, an offense that needs all the ambiguity it can get, and was skirted gingerly in the founding documents, has lost its definition. Overt, deliberate and highly injurious racism is rare, and severely punished. What survives is ambiguous racism, "implicit," the kind that can be read in more than one way by more than one person. It may exist below the threshold of consciousness. And along with subtle racism is subtle sexism, sometimes lurking beneath the "chivalrous" behavior of men, which reinforces gender stereotypes. The United States began double-minded about the prospects for a stable republic. The Authors of the new nation were under no illusions as to the defects of human nature, and its perpetual failure to come up to expectations. They harbored deep misgivings as to whether the ordinary citizen had the virtue, the intelligence and the character to preserve the precious liberties that were in their gift. So the wise Founders decided to adopt a somewhat paradoxical view of the situation. They were dubious about Americans, but optimistic about America. The fact that this was illogical, paradoxical, and did not bear close examination, nevertheless set the stage for an astonishing future for the country.