Month: September 2013

John Fonte’s thoughtful review of America 3.0 is entitled “E Pluribus Bonum.” Mr. Fonte is paraphrasing the motto of the United States, E Pluribus Unam — one from many. He is saying from many, the good.

Mr. Fonte’s professional concern in many of his writings has been on immigration, assimilation and national culture. And he correctly notes that we argue that America has indeed formed something good out of the many who have come here. We note the extraordinary assimilative powers of the American people, and of the Anglosphere generally in our book.

The mantra “We are a nation of immigrants” is repeated endlessly, but this incantation is essentially misleading. The addition of one adjective, “assimilated,” as in, “We are a nation of assimilated immigrants,” would greatly clarify our understanding of American identity. The question then becomes, Assimilated to what?

In America 3.0, we answer that question.

“Our American culture today,” Bennett and his co-author, Michael J. Lotus, tell us, “is part of a living and evolving organism, spanning centuries.” At the center of that culture is the American nuclear family. In the American nuclear family (as opposed to the traditional extended family), individuals are free to select their own spouses; grown children leave their parents’ homes and form new households; women enjoy a high degree of freedom compared with those in other cultures; children have no legal right to demand any inheritance from their parents; parents have no legal right to demand support from their adult children; and people have no right to expect help from their relatives.
 
The consequences of the American type of nuclear family, according to Bennett and Lotus, are that Americans are more individualistic, entrepreneurial, and mobile than other peoples. Suburbia is a major consequence, as American nuclear families prefer dispersed single-family homes over dense urban arrangements. Despite what they admit are “chaotic” changes in American family life, Bennett and Lotus do not “anticipate a basic change in cultural attitudes” that are “shaped by upbringing, language, institutions, and unconscious patterns of behavior that take centuries to form.”
 
Applying their anthropological-historical analysis, the authors note that the nuclear family emerged among the English. Bennett and Lotus state explicitly that the English family type became the American-style nuclear family, and this “underlying Anglo-American family type was the foundation for all the institutions, laws, and cultural practices that gave rise to our freedom and prosperity over the centuries.”

Mr. Fonte concludes on this note:

Bennett and Lotus have produced a very important evergreen book making a strong case for their myriad arguments. Interest among the conservative intelligentsia should be intense. There have already been endorsements from Glenn Reynolds, Michael Barone, Jonah Goldberg, and John O’Sullivan. Rebuttals from our friends at the Claremont Institute are sure to come: As Straussians rather than Burkeans, they will insist that politics (the Declaration of Independence) trumps culture (the nuclear family).

We are grateful to Mr. Fonte for his encouraging review. RTWT.

Daniel Hannan‘s wonderful review of America 3.0 is entitled “America’s greatest days lie ahead – provided she is true to herself.” This is a sentiment with which we heartily agree.

Mr. Hannan understands and concurs with the both the letter and the spirit of our book. For example, he shares our fundamental optimism:

A generation from now, Americans will be richer, more leisured, healthier and longer-lived than ever. That sentence could have been written at any time since the Mayflower landed (at least of the settlers; it was a different story for the indigenous tribes). It would always have prompted scepticism; and it would always have been true.
 
These days, it is a sentiment we rarely hear, which is all the more reason to pay attention when we do. In America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century, James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus begin by conjuring a cheerful vision of the United States in 2040.
 
… such a vision may look naïve. But when we ponder human history up to the present, it’s entirely plausible.

Mr. Hannan also agrees with our argument regarding the critical importance of the absolute nuclear family.

The point of the book is not to laud or criticise the Anglosphere’s nuclear family, but to show why it is immediately responsible for the individualistic culture that we share with only a handful of lands (notably the Nordic countries and the Netherlands). It made possible capitalism, because economic relationships were primarily mediated through cash rather than family obligations. It facilitated the industrial revolution, because people did not feel tied to their family plots. It opened up vast new landmasses to settlement, as children set out to establish their own nuclear families. It encouraged the assimilation of immigrants, who could make their way as individuals (though some first-generation Americans understandably struggle to adjust to the unfamilial attitudes of their children). It explains why we hanker after our own little plots, instead of living in neatly stacked apartments – or, to flip it about, it explains the suburbs that foreign visitors find so ugly and vulgar.

Please RTWT.

And go ahead and preorder Mr. Hannan’s forthcoming book, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. Mr. Hannan tells he draws on many of the same sources we do, and we are eager to see his take on the history.