The American Creed

...They still view the United States as a country that rewards personal integrity and hard work, as one that, government and politics apart, still works...

...There is one "great exception" to the Creed-the experience of American blacks...

...This policy lurch, rare in the book, is more appropriate for faculty argle-bargle than legislative corridors...

...In such precincts, America is portrayed as exceptional usually for its racism and sexism, its economic and social inequities, the scope of its flaws...

...From the seedbed of the American Creed-liberty, egalitari-anism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire-has flowered a society competitive, meritocratic, anti-statist, religious, and committed to equality of opportunity...

...Affirmative action and its corollary "quotas" in the past quarter century represent a rupture in the fundamental belief in equality of opportunity, as opposed to equality of results...

...Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times...

...America is exceptional in its genesis, born from a revolutionary event and, as part of that origin, possessing a "Creed" embodied in the Declaration of Independence and a "political religion" that developed from it...

...It is useful, then, when a modulated voice penetrates the clamor...

...But Lipset insists that contemporary trends and social phenomena be viewed in historical context...

...It is the egalitarian element in the American Creed that helped to create the consensus behind the civil rights revolution of the past thirty years," Lipset writes...

...What is less evident is that so many trends we mutter about- crime, drug abuse, permissiveness, and divorce, on the short list-are the waste matter of precisely those characteristics that make America "qualitatively different...

...Still, an alternative to the perceived "value crisis" is needed, and Lipset calls it "moral individualism...

...Seymour Martin Lipset's American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (Norton, 384 pages, $27.50) offers a perspective grounded in history and based on honest empirical comparisons with other developed countries...

...There can be little question," Lipset writes, "that the hand of providence has been on a nation which finds a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Roosevelt when it needs him...

...This would offer blacks career training and incentives for success-acculturation (though he does not use so freighted a term) to individualism and meritocracy...

...But if the Creed endures to this degree today, what of its prospects...

...But the more recent focus of the civil rights movement, with its emphasis on substantive equality and preferential treatment, has forced the country up against the individualistic, achievement-oriented element in the Creed...

...When I write the above sentence, I believe that I draw scholarly conclusions, although I will confess that I write also as a proud American...

...A "community in democratic pluralistic America is grounded in the individual as a thinking, moral actor, not in group solidarity...

...Lipset contends that the positive and the negative are frequently opposite sides of the same coin...

...And America's higher divorce rate goes back to the 19th century, not to the day before yesterday...

...But an increase in the malaise about politics and disdain for government, Lipset writes, may also reflect the growth of dependence on government since the 1930s: "Most people in the West, even those in the less statist United States, have come to rely on the state to solve most problems and to provide jobs, security for the aged, and medical care, as well as good schools...

...Lipset notes a pessimistic current in public opinion over the past three decades...

...Individualism as a value," he writes, "leads not only to self-reliance and a reluctance to be dependent on others, but also to independence in family relationships, including a greater propensity to leave a marriage if the marital relationship becomes troubled...

...Here, Lipset ventures into the prescriptive...

...It is also a characteristic of our national ethos to plunge between exultation and despond, about who we are and where we are going-a volatile combination of utopianism and pragmatism...

...Most Americans are not unhappy about their personal lives or prospects, he writes...

...Socialism and communism have collapsed, but heavy reliance on what Robert Dahl describes as an increasingly complex and incomprehensible government has not...

...If we have cuddled closer under the collectivist blanket than is healthy, America is still "the most religious, optimistic, patriotic, rights-oriented, and individualistic" of countries, Lipset writes in this thoughtful book...

...Despite the group-rights virus, Lipset concludes that the extent to which American exceptionalism "is still unique is astonishing...

...This is a stark distinction from countries that define themselves "by a common history as birthright communities, not by ideology...

...But I should hasten to add, not as one who thinks his country is better than other democratic societies, but as one who believes that the greatness of free polities lies in their institutionalization of conflict, of the continued struggles for freer and more humanely decent societies...

...This would all seem the stuff of a primer...

...Preoccupied with the present as most of us are (for reasons of practicality, contrariness, or laziness), our failure to contemplate the past can lead to civic sourness-the assumption that things are bad because we don't actually consider how bad they have been before...

...Lipset here summons Robert Putnam, he of the "bowling alone" thesis, the "privatizing" of America and the consequent decrease in "civic engagement...

...Invoking the military's success at integration, he writes that this "argues in favor of a large-scale national service effort...

...At this point, Lipset arrives-as do so many other critics-at television's supposed contribution to a loss of institutional trust through distortion, inherent and otherwise, in news and "entertainment...

...Lipset, now a professor at George Mason University, appears to have read every study, survey, sample, and poll since social science was a pup, and he marches and counter-marches this material like a Marine Drill Instructor...

...Lipset's book is a rigorous antidote to those wild mood swings...

...if anything the opposite is true...

...He is convincing, though, that critics have exaggerated many of the problems the nation faces "in the quest to demonstrate decay," and that the press has consistently mischaracterized national economic achievement...

...How account then for the continued stability of the American system...