Poisonous Pabulum

Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace. Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can--to be the shining city on a hill, the "last, best hope of earth." Ultimately, Americanism is derived from the Bible. The Bible itself has been a grand unifying force in American society, uniting Christians of many creeds from Eastern Orthodox to Unitarian, and Jews, and Bible-respecting deists like Thomas Jefferson--and many others who respect and honor the Bible whatever their own religious beliefs.

--David Gelernter

This sort of thing used to be heard at a certain kind of patrioteering rally. Don't get me wrong, love of one's place, one's people, one's country is a fine thing. But what is preached here is love of an abstraction, and replacing one's own particular love with a universal imperative. It's like preaching motherhood instead of caring for one's own children. Universal imperatives, usually founded in seemingly praiseworthy ideals, lead to universal bloodshed and universal tyranny. "Americanism" is no different.

Gelernter's is a rather silly and inaccurate reading of the Bible. Whatever interpretation of the Bible one favors, it's certainly not about equality or democracy, and the liberty it preaches is not Bill of Rights liberty but freedom from sin and death. The Bible is the story of particular communities--Israel in the Hebrew Bible, and the followers of Jesus and then the early church in the New Testament--it's not a philosophical, let alone political, manifesto.

For that matter, "democracy" was hardly beloved of the founders. Madison advocated many of the nation's institutions as checks against democracy. Civil society and consensual government are not the same thing as democracy, and as Goethe tells us, equality and liberty are inconsistent. You can't have both. "Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time," he wrote in his Maximen und Reflexionen, "are either psychopaths or mountebanks."

Gelernter's actually not bad on the follies of pacifism and globalism, though horrible in his acceptance of allied propaganda in WWI.

Gelernter was a victim of the unabomber, and apparently quite a fine computer scientist. Too bad he writes political drivel.