In large swaths of European political culture, and to Europhile American intellectuals, American affairs often seem incomprehensible, unacceptable, or irrational, as well as encapsulating a dose of violence that had been assumed obsolete.
Among many other factors, lies an "aberrational" historical background by European standards, a background that nonetheless represents a foundational moment, though many subsequent moments have changed it for better and for worse.
Incoming white settlers took up arms and waged wars on the indigenous population (“Native Americans”) before there was a state in America. Armament thereby preceded statehood, and that was before militias, by the late nineteenth century, played a major role in the beginning of the American Civil War. That is how broad skepticism of statehood, regulation, and organization took root in the country, and how freedom came to be associated with colonial settlement and limitless individual initiative.
For their part, the “Founding Fathers” were selective in their reading of John Locke, the English philosopher who profoundly influenced their thinking. Locke did not believe that citizens had a constitutional right to bear in the terms laid out in the Second Amendment. Rather, he argued that human beings are born into a “state of nature” and have a natural right to life, liberty, and property; thus, when there is no common authority to defend these rights, they are entitled to take up arms to defend themselves against violence and injustice. Armament and resistance are also justified when a government violates natural rights and wages war against the people. Bearing arms was, however, a collective rather than an individual decision in Locke’s view, and arms were only to be used to resist tyranny. Once a political society is formed, individuals relinquish their right to bear arms, declare war, and inflict punishment. The Second Amendment disregards Locke’s restrictions, driven by tradition of militias, deep suspicions of interventionist central government, and “life on the frontier,” which renders “Are you with us or against us?” the ultimate question.
Many, foremost among them the American political sociologist Barrington Moore, have pointed to another issue that is not any less consequential. The United States had never known the feudalism seen in Europe, and this has had a strong impact on its history, as the absence of a hereditary aristocracy endowed with privileges allowed for the emergence of an early political equality though limited to the white population. This absence of a feudal class facilitated the rise of republican ideals and broad political participation- to white settlers. Most of them had secured the right to vote by the early nineteenth century, before any country in Europe, making democracy seem almost “natural.” While European democracy grew from under the weight of peasantry’s struggle against feudalism and the clash between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, American democracy was distanced from social justice. At the time, it did not look unfamiliar that all the “Founding Fathers,” with the exception of John Adams, were slave owners, nor that Jefferson (the most eloquent advocate of democracy and many other virtues among them) owned six hundred slaves.
The absence of feudalism also meant the American Revolution was more conservative than the French Revolution that confronted feudalism and the Church. While the latter would go on to emphasize wealth redistribution, the former focused on defending property. Despite the injustice, especially racial injustice, justice did not occupy much space in mainstream American political thought.
Moreover, ownership of land did not confer social status in the United States in the way it had in Europe, remaining a mere commodity. This was facilitated by the vastness of the land, especially after it was seized from indigenous populations, as well as the lack of restrictions on buying and selling it. Geographic and social mobility spurred the conviction that individual effort, not origin, was the only source of success, giving rise to the myth of the “self-made man.”
Because society had been built around commercial contracts, markets, and the forms of association (churches, unions, clubs) celebrated by Tocqueville, individual rights came to outweigh collective rights, and American liberalism came to be defined by skepticism toward the state and hostility to socialist traditions (and taxes), which were to promote meddling. The law, as an arm of the state, was not seen as a constraint on individual initiative in the way it had been in Europe.
In fact, “the Southern tradition’’ meant exactly that the American south is not feudal, but an agrarian capitalist system founded on slavery that created extreme disparities in wealth without giving rise to a peasantry capable of revolution. After the Civil War, this system was effectively reinstated through a racial hierarchy that took the place of a feudal hierarchy.
In other words, race trumped the class, or rather, the former subsumed the latter whereby the social question did not pit peasants against feudal lords but enslaved Africans and indigenous populations against whites. Here, economic exploitation is harsher, as the labor market is segregated between white workers, who are incorporated into the political system and its institutions, and non-white workers, who are not.
As a result, republican democracy in America proved easier to attain but more superficial and fragile. Business was the primary source of social values, and the immigration for which the country has been known, above all, a “chance to make it.” Moreover, a sharp distinction was drawn between intelligence- useful and practical- and intellect- abstract and ultimately useless. These and others are the trends of what American historian Richard Hofstadter called "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" in the title of his most famous book.
