Customer Reviews

The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith With Our Values in a Dangerous World

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a wonderfully patriotic book, patriotic precisely because it recognizes the country's failings and seeks to raise and rally citizens towards achieving the nation's purpose. As an immigrant, the book's core message-- that America is an idea, not just a place-- resonated strongly we me. It is the idea of America that attracted, and continues to attract, so many people to the United States in the first place, not jobs or potential material benefits but the founding values of the nation, the sense that this is somewhere different and special, with a mission, a worthwhile mission. Sometimes this idea has the unfortunate consequence of causing those who agree with it to be blind to America's shortcomings and those who see the shortcomings to question the belief itself. But not here, not in this book; Slaughter reconciles faith with the need for improvement. Very few liberals have been able to articulate a worldview quite this way and it is so important at a time like this when there is a grave danger that the disappointments of the past few years may cause Americans to be disillusioned with the American idea itself-- or at least with how it plays out internationally-- rather than just with the individuals responsible for failed policies.

This engaging book offers tough love for America. That means loving America enough to demand that it live up to its ideals. The book quotes Carl Schurz: "Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right." Seven values are discussed: liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, faith. The touchy thing about writing about values is that people usually don't like to be told what their values should be. But this book never sounds preachy. Who knew a civics lesson would be so much fun to read?
I learned many things about American history--some delightful tidbits on American thinkers and heroes, and some villainous deeds that made me wince. I gained a richer appreciation for what the Founding Fathers accomplished. The book is well-researched, well-written, and packed with information in a form that is entertaining and easy to digest. It should appeal to all political persuasions except anarchists.
Other books have promoted a similar theme, but this one puts it in the context of globalization. Few of the problems facing us today are confined to national borders. America has no choice but to be a part of a global world; the book asks how we can maintain our values while doing so. In the vastness of space, Earth is a small village. The villagers need to get along with each other.
The seven values are timeless. The book shows where in our history we have exemplified these values and where we have not lived up to them. It points out the misguided back-sliding of the present administration of George W. Bush. It offers guidance for the future. This book will help America take its place in a globalized world. I hope it gets read by Senators, Representatives, government officials, newly-minted Americans, and citizens everywhere. A fair chance to raise yourself up through your own wits and courage and hard work, regardless of your starting point, is the American dream. Keeping the dream alive--and worth fighting for--also requires wit and courage and hard work, along with constant striving to live the seven values.

What is the point of required courses in American history? It would be easy to dismiss the history lessons that we were taught in high school as revisionist propaganda to indoctrinate us with idealized pilgrims, patriots, pioneers, and transcendental pragmatists. Yet, more honest histories intended to correct the myths, such as James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and Carolyn Baker's U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, cynically reveal a dark and sinister past that fails to teach us what distinguishes America from Afghanistan or central Africa (other than geography and the efficient exploitation of rich natural resources). It doesn't help that we live in a time obsessed with rewriting the present through an entire industry devoted to political `spin' and what Stephen Colbert has aptly named "truthiness." Witness the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of our efforts to bring democracy to middle eastern oil-states, even while our special interest groups routinely buy political favors, to celebrate our system of justice, yet enable the war crimes of Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo, to rally to the cause of environmentalism while using natural resources at a per capita rate that exceeds almost all major first-world nations by a wide margin.
What makes Dr. Slaughter's new book, The Idea that is America so important is that, by refocusing the history of our past deeds as a struggle to live up to our shared principles, it presents a third alternative to hopeless cynicism and blind nationalism. Slaughter, in this storied and passionate book, admits in detail troubling aspects of our country's unglorified past and present, while also providing a clear expression of our founding ideals and how they might lead us out of impotence. It is our values, she states, our deeply-held belief in the ideas of liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility and faith that can help us to illuminate our shadows again and again, and to find a way to see beyond them to a more hopeful future. It was our belief in freedom, for example, that led to the end of slavery, our belief in democracy that gave women and blacks the right to vote, and even our belief in justice and limited executive power that inspired the impeachment of Nixon.
Thinking of those times in our history when adherence to our founding principles sparked changes that we now take for granted, I can, at least for the moment, feel guardedly patriotic (though decidedly not nationalistic). Slaughter never suggests that this war between a history of ideals and reality is easy. Rather she depicts it as a long and intensely deliberate process. And we should not expect a happy ending. Rather we should not see an ending at all, only a process that we are all a part of, one we should all be a part of, to the best of our abilities.

For over a year Army Captain Ian Fishback struggled to get his superiors to respond to the prisoner abuse he witnessed repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan: thwarted he finally contacted Senator John McCain and questioned the diminishing American ideals which would sacrifice individual rights for the greater good. Here foreign policy scholars Anne-Marie Slaughter discusses the foundations of American beliefs - liberty, equality, justice and faith - and considers how these values should be upheld in modern times. THE IDEA THAT IS AMERICA: KEEPING FAITH WITH OUR VALUES IN A DANGEROUS WORLD is an especially strong pick for high school and college-level collections strong in social and political issues and debates.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Now that my own book INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty is at the printer am back into reading and really looking forward to catching up with the 25 books on my "to do" shelf. This one jumped to the top of the list at the recommendation of James Fallows, recently back from China and author of Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq among many other extraordinary books.

See my five-star review of the same author's A New World Order, which is the better book for professionals. This book I recommend to those who are, like the author of the book, emerging counter-culture spirits, restless in harness, acutely aware of the hypocrisy of "Empire as Usual" under this nominally liberal Administration as under the last. My book Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography) covers the same ground from a more pragmatic focus on the need for reality-based governance.

I have two competing views of this book. The first, beyond five stars, is earned by this quote from page 13:

QUOTE: In our history, the greatest patriots have been those leaders and ordinary citizens who have dared to hold America to our own highest standards--even at the cost of ostracism, punishment, imprisonment and, at times--e3ven death." I would add unemployment to the list--Washington today does NOT want to hear truth about anything at all.

My second view is somewhat jaundiced, as the author is both limited to the usual suspects in her citations (a cup of Founding Fathers with a sprinkling Council on Foreign Policy elites holding forth on the ideals at the same time they are working actively against the public interest across the board).

This book is well-intentioned and absolutely a joy to read. The best thing I can say about it is that everyone should write such an essay in their lifetime, if only to reconnect to the fundamentals, however narrow their focus.

I would have left the book at five stars had the author not so much time on the myth of Lincoln and the Civil War.

The author loses a star with me when she parrots the Abraham Lincoln line and clearly buys in to the idea that the Civil War was about the abolition of slavery. That's what I thought when I did my 110 page Senior Thesis (Singapore American High School) on the causes of the civil war. As a broadly read adult, I now know that it was a war by the industrial North against the agrarian South, against legitimate constitutional secession, followed by a twelve year carpetbagging military occupation and looting of the south. I know that Lincoln only freed the slaves the north did not control, out of "military necessity," and that the slaves in the North and West remained slaves. Lincoln violated the Constitution in suspending habeas corpus, conscripting Northern men to fight their countrymen in the south, and in declaring war on voluntary members of the United STATES of America. See my reviews on the various books at Phi Beta Iota under "Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Self-Determination & Secession." Her lack of knowledge (which I shared until recently) is representative of the fragmentation of knowledge and concentration of wealth that is killing the USA and the rest of the world, and the more I read, the more I am troubled by how ignorant we have all become, knowing more and more about less and less. This is a major reason why diversity joined clarity and integrity in the sub-title of my new book--without diversity of view so as to achieve holistic understanding, we cannot overcome the limitations of individuals including myself, and all the more so with respect to international and indigenous self-determination.

I absolutely love the author's appreciation for information and information sharing. On page 233 I am delighted to find this:

QUOTE: On homeland security, it turns out that spreading information about threats rather than hoarding it under more and more layers of classification is more likely to protect us.

Yup. Been saying that for 21 years, and I am the recovering spy, not an academic isolated from the worst of the secret world (such as the 80 disparate rotten databases in the National Counterterrorism Center today, run by a lawyer whose life experience has not prepared him for the task of herding rabid cats, dogs, and the occasional skunk).

Highlight for me include:

+ Author assisted by a direct descendant of Nathan Hale, whose statue stands in front of CIA HQS.

+ Author totally connects and represents the idea that America is an idea, not just a place, an idea about humanity and self-determination.

+ Author is clearly deeply troubled by the hypocrisy of it all. Only this past month the earnest Secretary of State got laughed out of the Middle East for talking about Iran as a dictatorship when we are best pals with 42 of the 44 dictatorships on the planet (see Ambassador Mark Palmer's superb Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025), a number of them in the Middle East and the beneficiaries of our massive proliferation of weapons of public repression and destruction.

Other books along these lines that I recommend (easier to find my reviews at Phi Beta Iota, all linked back to their respective Amazon page but also sorted in like categories, 98 of them):
Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States
The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country
Imagine: What America Could be in the 21st century
Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century

Professor Slaughter's book concerning the essential ideas that make up the foundation of our country provides a great opening for discussions in the classroom, book club, or around the dinner table. It does not matter if you agree with her political orientation as she does a reasonable job of presenting multiple perspectives of each "idea". Even for the ones that are clearly biased, they can still be used to liven up a debate. Ultimately, however, the core values she discusses are things that we should constantly remember; engaging in civil discourse to debate how we get there is more important than following her recommendations.

America's foreign policy during the last 7 years has been a bit of a self-denial and self-obliteration. It is needless to enumerate the numerous damages caused by imprudent White House's decisions under the Bush administration. Anne-Marie Slaughter, in a methodology blended with the legal reasoning and the political scientist's analysis, shows how liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith--declared core values of US liberal democratic tradition--have been cheated upon.

The ongoing US presidential race is about who is likely to restore America's credibility and trust. In the debates about what ought to be reformed or in 'force majeur' disbanded in US foreign policy, I think that Slaughter's book provides a worthwhile conceptual premise, a sort of 'benchmark for re-alignment'.

Cyril Fegue

Saw Dr. Slaughter interviewed on Charlie Rose and knew I had to buy the book. Slaughter is sharp, enjoyable to listen to, and among those with an academic record that is bound to impress. So I thought the book was going to be an enlightening argument for the values or ideas that make America the wonderful place that it is. The book does go into an interesting analysis of those ideas that might flow most trippingly off a patriotic tongue but in the end I was disappointed since there is no postmodern attempt to defend those values or even the appearance of the dilemma imposed by contemporary epistemological fact/value dichotomies. I still feel certain Dr. Slaughter is familiar with these issues and would offer a great resource in arguing for a perspective on them but it is not part of this book. Perhaps Dr. Slaughter will visit this other topic which might give better insights in the long run.

What a bunch of self-serving facetious 'Establishment' nonsense. Ann-Marie Slaughter publicly defended -- in 2003 -- the then impending Iraq invasion as completely "legitimate," and in the interests of the so-called values she details in the book. This was all apart from the question of whether it was illegal. She later advocated moving past the earlier debate on the Iraq invasion. Completely self-serving.

Much better : Smedley Butler's 1930s classic ("War is a Racket"). Also, J.W. Smith, Economic Democracy; The Political Struggle for the 21st Century, (M.E. Sharpe, 2000); e.g.--> "Only after one understands how freedom and rights are being suppressed by the managers of imperial states -- even as they preach peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule to their citizens to maintain their beliefs in the morality of their society, and thus assure the continued support of the masses for inflicting such violence upon the world -- can one write honest history. If one does not understand that process, one is almost certain to write a history in which, unbeknownst to the author, the background and documentation have been carefully created to give Managers of State the freedom to suppress other people's rights and transfer their wealth to the imperial center through unequal trades." (p.95)

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I just began this book last night. I intend to read it as objectively as I can. The reason for this is that its title, The Idea that Is America, strikes me as an approach to the stark division lines now clear in this country that is long overdue. I congratulate Ms. Slaughter for her foresight.

However:

I have to declare that some early statements place the author's judgement in high question for me. They are:

"Everyone around that [family dinner] table [at her grandparent's home in Belgium] knew that without the willingness of American soldiers and taxpayers to sacrifice their lives and dollars, Belgium would have become a German protectorate. America might not always live up to its own ideals, but overall, American power had made the world a better place."

[Preface, page 15]

These words strike me as hopelessly, suicidally, Chamberlainly, pretty-young-lady-with-lots-of-law-courses-and-much-comfort-living-the-life-of-elite-academic-bureaucrat-at-Princeton-and-no-grasp-none-at-all-of-worldly-reality-LY NAÏVE.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Universe, do you not understand that without the enormous sacrifice in blood, treasure, and misery of all the Allied peoples that Belgium and many other nations and peoples would NOT have become German protectorates, but would have ceased to exist at all? THERE WOULD NOW BE NO BELGIUM, AND THERE WOULD NOW BE NO BELGIANS. Precisely the same fate awaited many other nations, indeed, possibly all other nations.

I hold that for ultra-tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Tojo, Mao, Pol-Pot, Osama bin Laden and yes, Saddam Hussein - for such evil leaders any and all peoples who represent the slightest obstacle to their total power over all humanity are, in their minds, solely fit for ignominious extermination.

Ms. Slaughter speaks of the cataclysms of World War - I, II, Cold, and anti-Terror - as if they were different years for the World Cup. One can almost hear her whisper "Well, if we lose this year, we'll just try harder next year." But these wars are final. There is no next year. If we lose any of them we are finished forever. FOREVER.

So, for the record, the Allied Powers, in particular American Power, did somewhat more than "make the world a better place" - they throttled the threats of Nazism, Communism, and Militarism and made it a place once again fit for civilized human habitation. But we still have Terrorism to go.

I wonder what Ms. Slaughter's advice will be. Back to the book, trying not to be so damned skeptical, but wondering how I can do that.