SO AT THE END OF THE 8 YEARS THAT WERE KILLING THE IDEA, IT'S STRONGER THAN EVER:

The American Character: Bucking scholarly trends, Simon Schama argues it has a bright future (LOUIS P. MASUR, 1/16/09, The Chronicle Review)

With Barack Obama's election, the idea of an American national character is back, and it feels more salient than ever. Time and again during the presidential campaign, Obama told us his story: the mixed-race child of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas. He graduated from the Ivy League and was elected a U.S. senator. And then the self-described "mutt" became president. "Only in America," he declared.

Obama's popular narrative, and the way he has told it, promises to revive interest in what scholars term American exceptionalism — the idea that the American story is somehow unique. Attempts to define that quality have led foreigners to these shores, generated countless commentaries, and after World War II helped give rise to an entire academic discipline — American studies. But the topic has been notably out of fashion in the scholarly world. Now, from the well-known historian Simon Schama, we have a new, contrarian view that looks at what's unique in the American character, putting our past in the context of the election of the new president we are just inaugurating. [...]

"The big American story," Schama realizes, is "the war of toleration against conformity; the war of a faith that commands obedience against a faith that promises liberty." He does not say whether a fundamental change in the American character would occur if the wall between church and state crumbles under, for example, the kind of steady assault it has suffered in recent years. But he does note that the election in 2008, as he was writing, showed signs that "evangelical politics has had its day." In Europe, he says, the state crushes alternative dogmas; in America, the continuing dialogue between faith and freedom allows for pluralist beliefs.

An even bigger story is the making of Americans, the familiar narrative of America as asylum, melting pot, land of opportunity. Schama, who has a knack for apothegms, puts it this way: "In the Old World you knew your place; in the New World you made it." The language of the self-made can be found everywhere, he points out, whether in the words of Thomas Paine or Abraham Lincoln or Barack Obama.

But not everyone in America is welcome to participate in self-fashioning, Schama goes on. There was ambivalence over immigration present at the founding (for example, Benjamin Franklin denounced German newcomers), and it was never resolved. Immigration promoted liberty and prosperity while simultaneously posing a threat to national purity. The cycles of admission versus restriction have most often been tied to economic conditions. "Every time the American economy hits a reef," observes Schama, "the last on the boat are usually those whom nationalist politicians want to throw from the decks." The 1890s saw the establishment of the Immigration Restriction League, anxious about the influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans. Today an official league may not exist, but immigration officials watch out for groups seen as "undesirable."

After an unusually perceptive--for a European academic--book on the French Revolution, it's been largely down hill for Mr. Schama and he gets two big basics wrong here. First, and most fundamentally, liberty is, of course, conformist and integral to the democratic republic, which is dependent on faith. Indeed, the success of the melting pot is just a function of the irresistible pressure to conform, which turns immigrants into Americans within a generation, if not always in a single lifetime. The war is, rather, between faith and liberty against disbelief and freedom, which >offer no basis for America.

Second, anti-immigration hysteria precedes economic downturns--a booming economy being a powerful magnet attracting immigrants seeking opportunity. The backlash against the immigrants then helps feed the slowdown which would occur naturally because of the cyclical nature of economies.

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