Who is American Ideologue?
I hope you will allow me the opportunity to challenge your first impression of someone who calls himself an ideologue. Far from the extreme, dogmatic and incurious zealot the word conveys, I am actually a centrist who has been both a Reagan Republican and a ticket-spltting Democrat. I've spent most of my life as a heterodox thinker, before anyone knew what that meant: a gay (former) Republican; a former spouse of an Episcopal priest; an American expat who lived in Brussels and London where I came to appreciate European social democracy while my love of America grew even more.
I call myself an American Ideologue because of the nexus between my two greatest and most enduring passions, my love of ideas and my love of America. I believe America is a nation of ideas; a creedal nation. To say that America is a nation of ideas does not mean that America is only an idea, but rather that ideas are at the center of who we are as a nation, and that America cannot persist in their absence. I believe the American Ideology is real, it is vital, and it is dying.
The American Ideology was to be the topic of my doctoral dissertation before I cut my studies short to came to Washington to be where I thought the ideology came to life. (Let's chalk that one up to youthful naivete). The brief, obligatory stint on Capitol Hill turned into a busy and rewarding career helping companies build their reputation. But this project has always been my passion. The urgency to pull the trigger at this moment needs no explanation. If the work I began thirty years ago leads one or two people to remember who we really are as Americans, it shall be worth it.
Professional Background
I am a statistican and pollster by trade and a corporate communications leader by vocation. I was an early pioneer in applying advanced statistical methods in corporate reputation research (latent class modeling). My career has spanned roles across the globe in politics, management consulting, brand marketing, public affairs and corporate communications. I've been a strong advocate for a greater focus in data-driven strategy and measurement in corporate affairs and have worked both in-house (Exelon Corporation), as well as a senior leader at agencies including as President of APCO Insight and a Partner at the Brunswick Group in London. I have conducted reserch in over forty countries and have lived in Washington, Brussels and London, and can count a majority of the Fortune 100 as clients of the reputation model I pioneered.
Currently I lead the Health Analytics & Insights Group (HAIG) and am Executive Vice President at Reservoir Communications Group - one of the premier health care communications agencies in DC. I love my work, my clients and my colleagues--some of whom I have worked with for nearly twenty-five years. I am extremely fortunate to have a job that never fails to fulfill an insatiable curiosity. Please don't ask me to moderate another focus group though!
I hope my clients and colleagues will forgive me for admitting my true passion, however, is the American Ideology. My mentor and graduate advisor was one of the most acclaimed political scientists who, along with his close friend and colleague Seymour Martin Lipsett, were among the last to teach the American Ideology in political science. The late Everett Carll Ladd is better known as the long-time Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (the field I would ultimately adopt professionally), but was also part of a rich academic tradition that studied the American Ideology. He passed away shortly after I dropped out to pursue my adventure in Washington, DC. He said that I was needed in the academy more than in DC and instead of living with regret, I dedicate this project to his memory - The Original American Ideologue, Everett Carll Ladd (1937-1999).
Everett Carll Ladd
1937-1999
The Original American Ideologue
Everett Carll Ladd Jr. was one of the most consequential—yet now underrecognized—political scientists of the twentieth century. A towering figure in the fields of public opinion research and American political thought, Ladd combined the empirical rigor of social science with a profound reverence for the American experiment. As both a scholar and a teacher, he championed a view of ideology that refused reductionist binaries.
He was more than an eminent political scientist; to me, he was a mentor and the quiet architect of my intellectual framework. He helped me understand that the American Ideology was not a partisan label or an imported dogma but a native-born set of tensions, ideals, and institutions shaped over generations and deserving of study in their own right. Ladd spent his career exploring the American mind – our political ideology, our sense of national exceptionalism, and the currents of public opinion that shape our democracy.
He was, in temperament and geography, quintessentially New England. Born in Saco, Maine, and having spent virtually his entire adult life in the quiet towns of northeastern Connecticut, Ladd embodied the flinty, no-nonsense conservatism that once defined the region. He was one of the last hard-nosed, New England-style “conservatives”—not in the contemporary partisan sense, but in the older mold of principled reserve, civic-mindedness, and intellectual independence. Gruff and irascible on the surface, he concealed a deep well of wisdom, generosity, and moral seriousness that revealed itself only to those who dared to engage with him. I loved that about him. He reminded me of my own roots. His presence alone conveyed a kind of austere integrity, the sort that brooked no nonsense yet lit up when the conversation turned serious—about Tocqueville, or party systems, or what the public really believed.
In 1977, Ladd became Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut—a post he held for two decades and from which he exerted an outsized influence on the field. Under his leadership, the Roper Center expanded its holdings, established the Public Perspective magazine, and became the premier archive for survey data in the United States. Ladd's commitment to preserving and democratizing access to public opinion data was not merely administrative. It reflected his belief that American political culture could only be understood from the bottom up—from the enduring values of the public, rather than the fads of elites.
Throughout his career, Ladd was engaged in a quiet but profound intellectual partnership with Seymour Martin Lipset, his friend and ideological fellow traveler. The two co-authored a number of major works, including The Divided Academy (1975) and The American Ideology: An Exploration in the Origins of Political Culture (unpublished but often cited in lectures and public addresses), and their collaboration reflected a shared conviction: that America, as a “fragment society” in Louis Hartz’s terms, had developed a political culture deeply shaped by individualism, moral equality, and democratic republicanism. Ladd’s work extended Hartz and Tocqueville alike, showing that American political behavior could not be properly interpreted without understanding these deeper currents.
What made Ladd unique, even among his peers, was his refusal to accept the creeping cynicism of late 20th-century political science. At a time when the discipline increasingly turned toward hyper-specialization, rational choice modeling, and postmodern detachment, Ladd still believed in the American polity as a subject worthy of moral seriousness. He was one of the last to teach “the American Ideology” as an animating force—not as pathology, but as patrimony. To study America, for Ladd, was to honor an inheritance of liberty, equality, federalism, and republican self-rule—not uncritically, but faithfully, and always with empirical grounding.
As a mentor, Ladd’s impact was as personal as it was intellectual. He was not merely a professor but a guide.
Even now, all these years later, I still find myself discovering how indelible his influence has been—on the way I look at the world, the way I think, the way I interpret the things people say and believe. I was in awe of his uncanny ability to look at a sea of survey results and extract something meaningful, something genuine—and articulate it with the kind of quiet clarity that felt like watching truth settle into place. That skill, which I spent years trying to emulate, has served me better than any other in my professional life.
He also helped me view politics through a wider lens. I recall a lecture on Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life. Ladd delivered it with a kind of reverence I found perplexing. How could this man—no admirer of the Progressive movement—speak so passionately of its godfather? Eventually, I worked up the nerve to press him. I admitted that I found Croly nearly unreadable, and worse: a polemicist for big government who seemed to stand against the very vision of the Founders. He looked at me with a sly smile—almost as if he’d been waiting for me to ask. The silence that followed felt eternal. I’m sure my face went crimson in that small seminar room. And then he simply said: I had it all backwards. Croly, he explained, unlike his fellow Progressives (especially of the Woodrow Wilson variety), understood and respected the American ideological tradition. He grasped, with uncommon insight, that for the Progressive project to succeed—especially the New Deal—it had to summon, not reject, the moral language of American ideals. However he said it, the point landed like thunder. It changed everything for me. I stopped seeing America through the lens of pedestrian partisanship, and instead started to search for something deeper—something that could explain why I often felt happiest among people I disagreed with.
Everett Carll Ladd died in a quiet New England college town less than a year after I prematurely ended my graduate studies to pursue a career in Washington, D.C. There are moments in a person’s life that resurface unexpectedly—uninvited, inauspicious, but persistent. Not regrets exactly, but stubborn curiosities when we ask ourselves, "what if?" That last conversation with Dr. Ladd is one of mine. After I told him I was leaving my studies, he paused for a long while, then offered what remains the greatest compliment of my life—one that still haunts me: “You are needed more in the academy than in Washington.” I have carried those words with me ever since. This project is my attempt not to erase that decision, but to redeem it. It is how I honor the unfinished conversation and ensure that his legacy—his belief in ideas, in data, in the American mind—is not lost to time or traded away for proximity to power.