We the People Lost Faith First: The American Ideology Quiz

I have lived in and around Washington DC for most of my adult life. After twenty-five years I never succumbed to the cynicism that infects so many who see the sausage being made here: the deals, the compromises, the sharp elbows. It’s not because I watched it from afar. I played the game of party politics, knew how to be a loyal partisan, while working in the same four block radius where the DC professional class cycles in and out. But no matter how much I rooted for my team, how intensely I would experience the elation of election victories and the bitterness of losses, it was the American idea that always inspired the most passion.

Being close to the action in DC lost its appeal long ago, but I still see the landscape and all its symbolism the same way I did when I first set eyes on it as a teenager. Whenever the Capitol dome comes into view on my way to work, or I catch a glimpse of the south portico of the White House on Constitution Avenue, or I pass the white marble shrines to my heroes, I feel a tug of pride. Nothing, however, compares to the Fourth of July fireworks reflecting over the Washington Monument and Potomac River. When WETA plays the Battle Hymn of the Republic at the finale, the floodgates open wide. Of course, I keep most of this to myself, embarrassed by the seemingly naive sentimentality that I secretly indulge.

But here’s the thing: I haven’t watched those fireworks in many years. Although still mercifully immune to the cynicism of Potomac fever, I feel afflicted by something far more worrisome: despair. I was able to handle the disappointment, the anger and resentment I felt toward those I held responsible for hijacking my party and tearing the country apart. I could even handle the sleepless nights wondering how my own actions (or inaction) might have contributed to the rift. What I was not prepared for was my loss of faith.

That is exactly what the past two years have felt like. The feeling of losing faith crept up on me before I was able to define it or diagnose it. You know you’re losing faith when you begin to negotiate with nihilism (“Why am I writing right now about something that clearly doesn’t matter? There’s nothing I can do and there’s no one we can trust to care enough about a country I thought I loved…”).

But what exactly am I losing faith in? As much as I admire the Founding Fathers, they were mortals who have gone on to meet their own master (He who is the only source of true faith). Washington, Madison, Jefferson and Lincoln never promised us anything. They bequeathed a project that is always the next generation’s burden. Is it faith in our current political leaders that has been lost? While I’m not a cynical man, I’m certainly not a blind one. Even the most honest, honorable and tireless leader cannot be expected to heal our nation’s wounds alone. Unfortunately, I’ve lost faith in someone more important: You.

Well, not literally you.

I worry that I am losing faith in the American people. After all, it is We the People who are entrusted with this grand experiment; an experiment based on the proposition that our lives, our rights, our happiness are not grants of entitlement, not something owed to us by others or by a state, but rather obligations we have to ourselves and to others. America is a place that demands its citizens recognize the inherent equal dignity of every person; that through mutual respect and decency we prove ourselves worthy of the same. We the People understand that being a nation of laws, not of men, is how we secure our own liberty and justice for all.

We the People lost faith first; before any leader betrayed us, before political parties stopped working, we stopped believing in America itself. I have come to see this as the real emergency, the one underneath all the silly arguments we fool ourselves into believing are existential.

The American Ideology is not right or left; it is not an exercise in self-congratulation; it is not nostalgia. It is the proposition that free people can hold opposites together without coming apart: liberty and equality, the national idea and the democratic idea, the individual and the community, held in a tension that is not a competition to be resolved but the very mechanism that defines who we are. The American Ideology is the discipline of holding together what politics today demands that we choose between.

And faith in that discipline has been withering away; not all at once, but the way faith usually is lost, by negotiation and attrition. You’ll know this is happening when you start to feel despair. But as any Christian will tell you, despair is not sadness; it is the gravest of sins, the one that calls God a liar by insisting that nothing can be redeemed.

Here is what the despair taught me. It convinced me that the only response worth making was the one I couldn’t make alone: to fix the country, to change your mind, to make us believe again. That is despair’s oldest trick, to set the bar so high that you will do nothing at all. The truth is simpler and liberating. It is not for me to finish this work. I cannot make you believe in America as much as I wish I could. I can only do the part that I know how to do: build the instrument, lay out the case, and refuse to negotiate with nihilism.

I understand now that I launched this work in response to that despair: not to assuage my own sadness, but as an act of redemption. For most of thirty years I carried the regret of an unfinished dissertation where I argued that above events and beneath the noise there is a real and identifiable American creed. Last year I began writing it in public, here, as American Ideologue. In it I began laying out the framework, the cardinal values and the tensions they emerge from. The work is unfinished, I have more to share. But it will likely remain unfinished, because it is that kind of work, the kind each generation is handed and then hands off again.

What I am offering this Fourth of July is a small thing, a token. It is a quiz. But it is not the parlor version that sorts you right or left and gives you a label; it is an instrument built from the framework itself, and built to find the very thing I am afraid we’re losing. It locates the synthesized center where the creed is actually held, at full fidelity and in tension. It distinguishes the center from the void that sits at the very same coordinates; in the place where a person has stopped believing at all.

Go ahead, take the American Ideology Quiz below and prove me wrong.

Maybe this Fourth of July I’ll return to my spot on the banks of the Potomac to watch the fireworks once again. This time I won’t be embarrassed to shed a few tears of hope and joy for this country I still love.

Happy 250th Birthday, America.

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