The Secret of the American Idea : The United States: The world is moving toward our form of democracy. But the lessons won’t be easy.

When Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan praised Michael Barone’s new book, “Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan,” he did so by referring to James Bryce, an Englishman who came to have a look at America in the 19th Century. “Bryce had asked why peoples the world over were so intrigued by American arrangements; he answered that soon or late they expected ours to be theirs.”

Well, “soon or late” arrived in the world in 1989, as democracy busted out all over and with it a renewed appreciation for America the country coupled with an even bigger appreciation for America the idea. Nowhere is this more evident than in a conference being hosted by the Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel in Prague.

The conference is titled “The Peaceful Road to Democracy.” Invitations were issued to the leaders of independent democracy movements inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and panels consist of Eastern and Western experts.

The date the conference begins is no coincidence, today, July 4.

How prophetic Bryce was! A century after his look at America, the rest of the world is moving toward making our arrangements theirs. But what are our arrangements? What is it that makes the idea of America the cause for international celebration? It is clearly nothing so simple as the constitutional framework that our Founding Fathers developed. In the 200 years since our Constitution was written, it has been copied, many times, without producing anything near the idea of America that will be cause for celebration in Prague.

To go looking for the idea of America is no simple task, but Barone’s book is not a bad place to start. And in the telling of the story we find the first secret of the American idea: It is constantly changing and constantly being remade. It encompasses conformity when conformity and institutional bigness are necessary to cope with the Great Depression and to win World War II. It encompasses radical diversity and challenge to the establishment when the civil-rights movement begins. And it encompasses the shift to a small-unit economy when the technology and the mentality of the post-industrial economy demand flexibility.

It is this very dynamism, reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s recommendation that we have a revolution every 20 years or so, that makes lessons difficult--but they’re there.

The first is a lesson that seems to have been learned well by the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe and even by the less radical movements inside the Soviet Union: criticize. The civil-rights movement began, in Barone’s words, a period of “national self-criticism” and “belligerent skepticism” that was “a necessary part in the improvement of the system. Progress in desegregation and integration could not be secured until white Americans were convinced that one important underpinning of their system was rotten.” The national critique that began in the ‘60s was, Barone says, a critique that could only come from a nation “successful enough to be concerned about means as well as ends.”

Thus the second lesson about the American idea is that it is not relative--it is absolute. In other words, the context of success in which the torrents of criticism occurred--the fact that we managed to make a nation that was wealthier, more egalitarian and more tolerant than probably any other nation in the world--was no excuse for not living up to the ideal in race or in any other matter.

The third lesson, a lesson that the emerging democracies of the world may fail to heed if their countries degenerate into regional and ethnic conflict, is about diversity. Immigration figures prominently in the story and the idea of America. The immigrants of the ‘70s, like the immigrants of the ‘20s, settled in those areas of the country with the highest economic growth. They did not, however, sap and strain those economies; they contributed to them, and to the ever-changing nature of the American idea.

The fourth lesson is about accepting the will, if not the wisdom, of the people, a lesson that some of Barone’s critics cannot accept--especially when he gets to the Reagan years. “The 1980 result,” says Barone, “was not an accident. It showed that most American voters wanted limits on the growth of government at home, a more assertive foreign policy abroad and some greater honoring of traditional moral values in their basic institutions.”

In the story of America, the will of the people swings in wide and often surprising ways; in the idea of America it is the final word. Who knows what form the idea of America will take at the Prague conference? But one thing is certain: The goal of mobilizing for democracy is the creation of a society that works without constant mobilization. A century ago Bryce marvelled at this phenomenon. “A citizen has little time to think about political problems. Engrossing all the working hours, his avocation leaves him only stray moments for this fundamental duty.”

This Fourth of July we should devote a stray moment to the idea that much of the world is trying to figure out.