belonged in the United States; at other times, the political culture of the USA
is resolutely Lockean—individualist, tolerant, and rational. Thus Smith
seems to oVer us an alternative to American exceptionalism—the United
States, in the ‘‘multiple traditions’’ account, is summed up by no one narra-
tive, it has no ‘‘essential soul.’’ Smith makes Hartz’s point, however, even as he
attacks it, by his struggle to defend liberalism (his exceptionalist credo) from
the disturbing indictments of Hartz’s and Rogin’s arguments. American
democracy has been illiberal, Smith argues:
Locke insisted that the ‘‘natural endowments’’ of ‘‘savageAmericans’’ fell ‘‘in no way
short’’ of ‘‘those of the mostXourishing and polite nations,’’ and he dismissed as
childish the notion that ‘‘a Negro is not a Man.’’ Unlike many of his contemporaries,
he never suggested that history or nature made descent from Anglo-Saxon
stock, rather than educated reason, a prerequisite for exercising basic liberties.
(Smith 1997 , 78 )
It is as if Smith feels that America has let Locke down by being racially
‘‘ascriptive’’—quarrelsome and contentious, as it were—rather than rational
in its politics. America has just not been exceptionally Lockean enough for
Smith. Perhaps this explains his abstractly rational proposal for stripping US
citizenship from the children of ‘‘illegal aliens,’’ a plan that, at the very least,
can serve as an ‘‘ascriptive’’ tool for racist anti-immigrant movements, but
that he invokes for the sake of resolving messy and ‘‘inconsistent,’’ irrational
and contentious, American citizenship laws (Smith 1997 , 309 – 10 , 581 ; see also
Schuck and Smith 1985 ).
Smith alerts us to a consistent note in American exceptionalism, from long
before Louis Hartz helped to develop the concept in the pages of American
social science: the willingness, and perhaps the need, to embrace invidious
distinctions in the project of deWning America’s special role in the history of
the world. Satan is only certain of who he and his compatriots are after
committing to their war, and if American democrats have always preferred
toWght ‘‘with God on their side,’’ the comparison is still apt—to know one’s
personal mission is ‘‘exceptional,’’ one must know who one is, and one knows
that by knowing who one is not. TheWght to deWne the ‘‘essential American
soul’’ has drawn together Puritan theocrat and satanic rebel, creating a
political space in which Hartz’s benign American democrat, ‘‘torn by self-
doubt,’’ can become a ‘‘cold, stoic... killer.’’ At the close of his book,Civic
Ideals, Smith asks Americans to commit to their nation, as patriots called
upon to ‘‘be truer liberal democrats than most Americans have ever hoped to
be,’’ who ‘‘should give support and guidance to their country so long as it
292 ronald j. schmidt, jr.