A fragment:

Wilfred McClay has observed that despite our reputation as extroverted materialists, Americans have a strong introspective streak. [1] That is not surprising in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the United States has attained a world supremacy unmatched by any country in history. Power, as Richard Neuhaus pointed out long ago, is not self-justifying, and the enormous power that we now hold requires some explanation. Norwegians, Neuhaus surmised, spend relatively little time reflecting on the meaning of Norwegianness, but that is because Norway makes far less of a claim on history or on the world’s attention. We are introspective because we want to convince ourselves that the power we hold is somehow right – not that we necessarily have a right to such power, but that it has at least enough legitimacy to allow us to use it. We need to convince ourselves that there is justice in empire. [2]

Even when the power of the American colonies was pathetically tiny, even when the republican system was truly in an experimental – that is to say, an undecided – state, Americans devoted time and energy to reflecting on the character of America, its role in history, its standing among the nations.

Our introspection does not in fact contradict our extroverted instincts, since much of our self-assessment focuses on our national vocation. Musings on the meaning of America are not merely as old as American global hegemony. They are as old as America itself. Why?

This introspective habit is inherited in some ineffable way from our Puritan founders and perhaps even more from the tortured post-Puritan souls who wrote our early literature. It is partly a function of our diversity. We do not have a common ancestry or ethnicity. We think of ourselves as a nation founded on a set of ideas about politics and humanity, founded on a creed. We are not capable of discovering our commonality from a family tree. Our commonality must be intellectual, must be the product of discourse, debate, and converse. So we talk about ourselves, incessantly. It is also a product of our novelty. Each dollar bill proclaims us to be the novus ordo saeclorum a new venture and new adventure in the history of nations. Creations ex nihilo invite inspection.

We think of ourselves as God’s people, and accordingly we have frequently been visited by prophets who call us to our better selves. Jeremiahs with their stinging jeremiads are part of our American tradition.