The document critiques previous analyses that viewed American political culture as purely embodying liberal democratic values, arguing instead that inegalitarian traditions shaped the culture as much as liberal ones and that these analysts ignored issues of race, ethnicity, and gender. It presents the "multiple traditions" thesis that America incorporated both liberal and illiberal traditions from its origins, with illiberal traditions like those defending racial hierarchy deeply influencing political culture, and questions the presumption that liberalism alone supported or opposed racism, nativism, and patriarchy in America's history.

1. Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz:
The Multiple Traditions in America
Nathan Fuller

2. The Problem
Analysts describe American political culture as the
archetypal example of liberal democracy.
WRONG!
Inegalitarian conditions have shaped our culture
just as deeply as liberalist conditions
Inherent injustice – culture centered about the
white male
American political culture was egalitarian
compared to Europe

3. Perspective
Tocqueville
America’s founding not
& Others actually “flat plain of
egalitarianism”
Instead, America’s
initial condition was “a
rather small, recently
leveled valley of
relative equality
nestled amid steep
The Big Picture mountains of hierarchy”

4. Multiple-Traditions Preview
Liberal democratic Relevance to
traditions have been contemporary politics
contested parts of 1. Inequality may be
American culture reestablished in the
years ahead
2. Eliminates
complacency
(despair?) engendered
by belief that liberal
democracy has always
reigned in America

5. Brief Overview of T, M, & H
Tocqueville: Myrdal: Hartz: relatively
“middle class Americans egalitarian and
and economic shaped by free economic
freedom” egalitarian and social
Enlightenment conditions – lack
ideals. of feudal
Inconsistencies institutions.
due to All conflicts
irrational within liberal
tradition boundaries.

6. “Liberalism? Of course.”
“Yet all wrote at times
when the nation was
still denying most
persons access to full
standing within the
American political
community on racial,
ethnic, or gender
grounds” (551)

7. Race. Ethnicity. Gender.
Tocqueville Myrdal Hartz
Race & Ethnicity Two exceptions to Initial: only blacks Defends slavery.
American democracy outside American (states’ rights
(“tangents”): Creed (esp. in &neofeudalism)
• Native Americans South)
• Blacks Slavery necessary
Later: lots of to “keep democracy
imputed racial for the whites”
inferiority
Gender “Clearly distinct
spheres of action for
the two sexes”
COMPLETELY
SILENT

8. Where did “race” come from?
“The answer is that it had
been burned into
American minds by
prestigious intellectual
traditions, most of them
inarguable non-liberal,
that defended subjugation
of nonwhites by
contending that humanity
was naturally divided into
hierarchically arrayed
‘races.’”

9. The Problem of Presumption
“Despite the new
scholarship of race,
ethnicity, and gender,
then, liberalism is still
usually understood to
have been both the chief
ideology of opposition
to racism, nativism, and
patriarchy in America
and the chief (or even
sole) ideology
supporting them.”

10. The Multiple-Traditions Thesis
Coming on Thursday

11. Questions
1. Has liberalism prevailed at all in American
culture? To what extent?
2. Is it sufficient for Smith to define liberalism as
an absolute or should liberalism be defined
contextually?
3. Could America have survived if it were truly a
liberalist nation (as Smith defines liberalism)
from its beginning?
4. Is there a boundary to how much liberalism
should be allowed? Can liberalism have
negative effects?
5. Are there any modern/current examples of
illiberalism in America today?