91����

“Stop Calling America An Experiment”

America, like a 7th-grade science project, is an experiment. Right? Wrong! This image of America as an experiment crowds out recognition of the many ways the American Founding and its creation of a republican form of government were the antithesis of experimentation, grounding its political and moral principles instead in time-tested customs, rituals, and institutions embedded in the constitutional heritage of England and the ethical texture of Christian civilization. America, properly understood, is not a product of experimentation but a product of inheritance. The point is not to rehash the “rights of Englishmen versus natural rights” or “creed versus cultures” debates, but to show how the deluge of overtures to the American “experiment” in light of the Semiquincentennial distorts Americans’ political psychology. A modest proposal, then: Before we call America an experiment, let’s first call it an inheritance.

Gregory M. Collins
Lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics
Yale University