People have been asking why I, an Indonesian with broken English, study American politics. Why don’t I, like many other international students studying political science in the U.S, study Comparative Politics as the first subfield instead? Why do I insist to study and write a dissertation on politics in the US, which isn’t my country? I had been dodging the question, offering those you-know-I-don’t-mean-it types of answers. Even myself hadn’t known the answer, until yesterday.
As part of a class I’m taking, I read a book by political scientist Russell Dalton: The Good Citizen. It’s a good book, but nothing captured my attention as much as the last page of the book. Dalton quoted Bono’s commencement address in 2004 at UPenn. Couple sentences struck me right in the mind, and heart:
I’m in love with this country called America. I’m a huge fan of America … I read the Declaration of Independence and I’ve read the Constitution of the United States … I love America because America is not just a country, it’s an idea.
That’s it, I found my answer.
I study American politics because I don’t want to merely study how people compete for public offices. I can study that anywhere else. I also don’t want to merely study legislative bodies and learn how they represent or fail to represent the people. Many other fields are better suited for that. I don’t want to study only politics. I want to study ideas!
I want to study how the great ideas of equality, of freedom, of human rights, and of government by the people were conceived, are strived for, and are or were betrayed by the very people they define. I want to study ideas manifest in reality, not in the minds of philosophers.
America was founded on the ideas that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. As long as the ideas live, a study of American politics will never be merely a study of politics. It will always be a study of mankind’s greatest ideals. True, the ideals are so great that if we compared the present states of all nations in the world against their respective national ideals, America would probably be on the lower rank. But that’s the problem with great dreams, isn’t it? If you dream small, you can easily achieve them. The challenge of dreaming high is that when you fall you fall hard.
And that’s why America is not perfect. It falls short of its ideals. It has problems. It did terrible things in the past. It failed to act when it was needed or acted just when it was not supposed to. But every single nation has problems and made some mistake, didn’t they? I love America, as a country and much more importantly as an idea, not because it is perfect. Far from that, it is because the country exemplifies how far and close humans can be from their ideals of liberty and equality.
American politics is not about politics per se. It is about the greatest experiment in human history. An experiment that relies on the premises that humans, fallible and self-interested they are, are equal to one another, free, and capable of self-governing. It is an experiment that does not buy it that only the holy, educated, or chosen ones can govern. Instead, it believes in ordinary people—people like you and me. It is an experiment that trusts people, probably more than they trust themselves. I don’t want such an experiment to fail. I want it to flourish here, in the so-called land of the free, and in all edges of the world.(*)