After this Fourth of July, we Americans find ourselves on a journey to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and thus in some degree the founding of our nation, to be celebrated next year. The Fourth usually promotes a good deal of thumotic, spirited patriotism: the wearing of red, white, and blue, grilling meat and drinking beer with family and friends, and the lighting of fireworks to celebrate the occasion. This is all to the good: Our gratitude for our national inheritance must be embodied, incarnated in the practices of festivity. But to truly honor the generation of founding fathers, who hoped to be able to author “good government from reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force” (see Federalist no. 1), we should spend some time in the upcoming year reflecting on what the American genius has been historically and is today in the twenty-first century. This is especially the case as we find ourselves as Catholics with an American-born pope, an unabashed fan of the White Sox, who took the name Leo XIV after a pope who, among other things, condemned what he called “Americanism.” In seeking self-knowledge, we have to address both our present politics and past history.
As a guide to such reflection, we would do well to read a recent work by János Csák, a short book entitled The Genius of America (2024). In it, the current Hungarian minister of culture and innovation seeks out, in just over 150 pages, the “intellectual and spiritual underpinnings” of the United States. He undertakes such a project on account of his long-standing love of America and his sense that the American ideals present “the most beautiful ambitions for human life on earth,” despite the fact that we have not always lived up to our ideals and that presently many in American public life, from politicians to university professors to activists, seek to repudiate our heritage of ordered liberty.
His analysis in his final chapter, “The American Genius Today,” of the political divisions in our country is one place where the work shines. He examines the division between political Left and Right as the embodiment of two different worldviews: the first, “the Puritan, Jacobin, Marxist, Left-Liberal tradition,” and the second, “the Biblical, Classical-Liberal, Republican, Conservative worldview.” While there’s perhaps more inherent tension between the elements of the latter than he credits, particularly between the biblical-conservative and classical liberal dimensions, Csák carefully examines figures within the former tradition, such as Herbert Marcuse and Saul Alinsky, in such a way that makes leftist thought more transparent to those who—without having studied its curious contortions—might not have understood the practical aims that have guided generations of institutional actors in the United States.
An analysis of how words bring about the imagined reality of national community is another of Csák’s strong points. In the second chapter, “The Theology of the United States,” he discusses not only the biblical morality that was a shared heritage for the early colonial Protestants, the founding fathers, and the unmentioned Catholic minority, but also the secular utilitarianism that threatened to replace it. That utilitarianism, he argues, following Alexis de Tocqueville, was more “an individual strategy” to fulfill “the desire for wellbeing” than a communal myth, and so the image of manifest destiny was created in 1845, using religious language for a secular purpose. While Csák rightly points out that this or other religious metaphors of American unity were not able to resolve the contradiction between America’s ideal of liberty and the reality of the practice of slavery within its borders, his analysis of that dissonance leaves much to be desired.
Perhaps the only silver lining of the cloud of the last several years of particular agitprop by the educational Left since 2020 (one leaves aside the longer-term project of indoctrination that they tend to call “public education” since John Dewey) is the great effort by patriotic historians and scholars of American public policy to clarify the record as to American race relations and slavery during and after our founding. When it comes to these matters, Csák unfortunately repeats several claims that are either simply false or lack the relevant historical context to be fully intelligible. For instance, in his fourth chapter, he claims that “until 1868, the Constitution considered slaves to be only three-fifths people.”
Leaving aside the fact that a government minister should understand that documents assembled by committee for governmental purposes rarely state claims of philosophical anthropology, the simplest historical background on the matter would suffice to show that the so-called Three-Fifths Compromise had nothing to do with how slaves were considered metaphysically, but only how they were to be considered for the apportionment of representatives to Congress. Counting them as full persons for this purpose would have given the Southern states more power in Congress, more representation for persons not politically free and allowed to vote. The Northern delegates wanted to count slaves not at all for purposes of representation, but the Southern delegates threatened to withdraw from the convention, and it should go without saying that two rival nations on American soil would not have served the long-term project of emancipating the slaves and ending a great system of injustice.
Csák’s analysis of Thomas Jefferson’s slave-owning and of the American relationship with the Native Americans similarly lacks the context needed to make sense of the historical realities at play. In the first case, Csák trots out the well-known contradiction between Jefferson as writer of the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson the slave owner, even after the State of Virginia permitted the freeing of slaves, but does not see that this contradiction is not an intellectual matter (which he ascribes to Jefferson as a kind of proto-Nietzscheanism) but a moral one: Historian Susan Hanssen has discussed the contrast between Jefferson’s fiscal intemperance and George Washington’s fiscal prudence, which allowed the father of our country to not only free his slaves at his death but provide a generous financial settlement for each of them, understanding that true freedom requires an ability to provide for oneself and one’s own, not merely the lack of legal enslavement.
Similarly, while Csák points to injustices done to Native Americans, his treatment of that history gives the impression of innocent native peoples besieged by greedy settlers, the framing of events that the Marxist intellectuals whom he so criticizes in his book’s closing have attempted to perpetuate. Such a framing ignores that violence between the two groups was often instigated by Native Americans, whose warring tribes had a long history of violence between themselves long before the arrival of Europeans to American shores. Take one example, from a place name: Wheeling, West Virginia, where I sit as I write, is named from a word of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians, wihlink, which means “the place of the head,” where they had put to death a war prisoner and stuck his head on a pike. While there was real injustice done to Native Americans throughout our country’s history, a simplistic oppressor-oppressed narrative does not do justice to the complex reality of the times.
Csák’s concluding note does point to a simple reality often ignored by the inhabitants of right-of-center think tanks in decades gone by, although many are beginning to identify the central piece of the puzzle of our societal disfunction: a profound lack of attention to the family. Concern for the family as a fundamental aspect of human destiny and a revelation of God’s love for his Church has been a frequent emphasis in Catholic teaching, particularly in the tradition of social doctrine that began with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and continued in Pius XI’s Casti Connubii and John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio. But such concern has not always guided American policy, which has incentivized single motherhood since the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson. True communal festivity cannot take place without thriving families, and for America to celebrate the Fourth of July for years to come, it is not enough (though it is important) to get our history right; we must also support young people as they endeavor to embark upon the adventure of family life, the founding of not only the domestic church but the domestic civitas, the true foundation of our republic.