Introduction to Part 2

The notion that America is an exceptional society has always been fraught—and never more so than today. The features of American life that used to inspire pride in so many of its people, especially its individualist ethos, high standard of living, openness to immigrants, and constitutional stability, now arouse in many other Americans harsh criticism and sometimes even contempt. We are a far more sharply-divided country in 2023 than we were in 2005—more rancorous, more ideologically self-segregated, more apprehensive and suspicious of fellow Americans, more prone to violence and threatening confrontations, and more mistrustful of our national government and many other communal institutions than most close observers can recall.

This Part consists of three essays that speak to American exceptionalism. The first is an unpublished paper that I wrote for a festschrift honoring James Q. Wilson, perhaps the most astute, broad-gauged, rigorous, and influ¬ential academic analyst of American society until his death in 2012. I had the privilege of co-editing with Professor Wilson a volume, Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (2008), which exploited the work of leading social scientists in many different fields to analyze just how distinctive the United States is in a wide range of institutional and policy domains. The essay summarizes their findings and Wilson's (and my own) gloss on those findings. Although that book was published 15 years ago, virtually all of its general findings, as distinct from specific numbers, remain accurate today. The book did not mention Obamacare, which took effect gradually beginning in 2010. The second piece is a New York Times op-ed I wrote about Wilson upon his death highlighting some of his other contributions to our understanding of American society. The third, much shorter essay is my analysis of an article by noted political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. That much-discussed book famously contended that Americans increasingly isolated themselves in self-referential nodules that tended to minimize the kind of “bridging” social capital that characterizes healthy democratic communities and institutions. My analysis here reflects on how Putnam's article bears on his earlier book's thesis and thus on an important ingredient of American exceptionalism.