Bacon-flavored broccoli isn’t a madman’s fantasy anymore. It’s America’s ticket to reasserting herself as one of the world’s top scientific super powers while at the same time allowing her to make a quantum leap out of a crippling recession. In order to climb back into the saddle Americans needs to tap back into what has united them over the centuries in a singular purpose. A sense of collective ideology has enabled Americans to undertake and accomplish things so that are both exceptional and revolutionary.
- New York Times
Yet America’s ingenuity is a double edged sword. It’s both a blessing and a curse. A question lingers as to how America’s shared ideological ethos has evolved. From its inception as an Eden and refuge for people who found themselves marginalized and unwelcome elsewhere, America has come to harness and tame those differences within a climate of “hyphen” American culture. When asked what it means to be American or what overarching ideology binds Americans together, a laundry list of demographically subjective opinions spring up. Alex Tocqueville figured it out more than a century and a half ago.
Tocqueville was a French political philosopher and a De facto historian who traveled throughout America during the 1830’s. He was from an aristocratic French family and a dyed-in-the-wool European Romanticist. He set the tone for future exploration in social sciences with his seminal work known as “Democracy in America”. Essentially Tocqueville asserts that a collective subconscious pioneering spirit is at the core of what unites Americans ideologically. He draws attention to the concept of “The Frontier”.
Americans at the time Tocqueville visited had been on a steady march towards the west for roughly six decades. These pioneering folks shared a kindred spirit, he deduced. A deep-rooted ingenuity to conquer new and unfamiliar territory is what defined the American esprit de corps. The ability and independent fervor to try unconventional ideas and trends in order to pacify unfamiliar territories lends itself to a loosely knit ideological cohesion. However, if the ideological trends stay fluid they are subject to eminent change which is ever looming on the horizon. It stands to reason then that if these trends are in perpetual state of change then an inevitable loss of a uniting tradition will be the outcome.
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2012.
