In Search of the American Ideology: A Sweep Through American Political Philosophy
- Bryan Dumont
- May 9
- 8 min read
If there is such a thing as an American Ideology—a coherent set of ideas and values that shapes how Americans think about government, politics, community and culture—how have scholars historically understood it? What models have they proposed to define it, and where do those models fall short?
This question matters, not just for political scientists or historians, but for anyone trying to make sense of American polarization, the current distrust in institutions, or the feeling that something central to American identity is eroding. If we don’t understand how previous thinkers have defined the American Ideology (or denied its existence), we can’t see what they missed—or how a new framework might help us recover something vital.
Let’s explore four different “discoveries” made by academics in their search of the American Ideology. Each sheds light on part of the story, but none offers a complete picture.
1. The Liberal Consensus School: Everyone’s a Lockean (and No One Knows It)
The first major school of thought is what we might call the liberal consensus model, best articulated by political scientist Louis Hartz in his 1955 book, The Liberal Tradition in America. Hartz argued that because the U.S. was never a feudal society, it never developed a true conservatism or socialism. Instead, the country was born "equal," and so its political thought never really left the framework of classical liberalism—specifically the Lockean belief in individual rights, private property, and limited government.
For Hartz, Americans weren’t just committed to liberalism—they were trapped in it. Liberalism was so pervasive it became invisible, like the ideological air Americans breathed. The result? Political debates in the U.S. have largely been family quarrels between different versions of liberalism: the New Deal liberal versus the laissez-faire liberal, not the liberal versus the Marxist.
One of Hartz’s greatest contributions was the introduction to the concept of the “fragment society” whereby America’s ideology and character can be explained by the unique (and somewhat odd) character of a very specific and narrowly defined class—or, "fragment"—of British society: specifically, the new middle class of Protestant shopkeepers and merchants. The fragment was what the French would disparagingly refer to as bourgeois—a term that, ironically, better captures the habits and predilections of modern Americans than perhaps any native label, including “middle class.” At the time, the French would describe bourgeois as being:
·moralistic to the point of prudishness and conformity,
·obsessed with commerce, money and material advancement,
·fiercely defensive of individual liberty while having little tolerance for crime and disorder, and,
·morally superior on account of one’s self-reliance and earned success.
These traits, which at the time seemed eccentric or provincial, have since come to define a quintessential type: the American citizen. In other words, here we see evidence of an ideological “DNA” that came across the ocean at the very birth of the nation and helps prove there is such a thing as an American Ideology, after all.
Hartz’s contribution to our understanding of the American Ideology is unmatched in its ambition. He offered a grand narrative—and, arguably, the first serious attempt to define an American ideological tradition in explicitly analytic terms. His work inspired generations of academics, from Seymour Martin Lipset to Everett Carll Ladd, to probe the intellectual DNA of American politics.
But Hartz’s account was ultimately too simple. It couldn’t account for the deeply communitarian strains in American life, from the Puritan covenant to Tocqueville’s townships, to the robust civil society of modern America. And it didn’t explain why Americans have continued to debate what liberty means, or how liberty exists in tension with other core values, especially equality. Despite the limitations of his definition, Louis Hartz was the original American Ideologue!
2. The Multiple Traditions Thesis: A House Divided
In response to Hartz, political theorists like Rogers Smith, Michael Sandel, and Danielle Allen developed a more pluralistic view. According to Smith's multiple traditions thesis, American political culture has always been shaped by a tension between at least three distinct traditions:
Liberalism: rooted in natural rights, property, and consent.
Republicanism: grounded in civic virtue, the common good, and participatory citizenship.
Ascriptive Hierarchy: justified by race, gender, ethnicity, and other inherited traits.
This model has the advantage of acknowledging contradictions in American history. How could a nation founded on equality permit slavery? Why has populist rhetoric often masked exclusionary policies? Smith's answer: these are not inconsistencies within a single ideology, but clashes between competing, coexisting ones.
Michael Sandel, meanwhile, brought attention to the limits of liberalism as a philosophical project. In works like Democracy's Discontent, Sandel argues that liberalism tends to sideline questions of virtue, shared purpose, and the meaning of citizenship. What Americans really crave, he suggests, is not just freedom from interference but membership in a morally meaningful political community.
Yet the multiple traditions model, for all its depth, still leaves us without a satisfying analytical framework. It often emphasizes conflict at the expense of coherence. It tends to treat American ideology as a tangle of irreconcilable narratives, rather than a dynamic framework in which competing values (liberty, equality, community, order) are held in tension and negotiated over time.
Moreover, by focusing so heavily on exclusion and domination, it struggles to explain why the American Creed has also been a powerful engine of inclusion. Social movements from abolition to suffrage to civil rights to same-sex marriage have all appealed not to foreign ideologies, but to America's own founding principles.
3. The American Creed: A Civil Religion and the Case for Exceptionalism
Another influential account comes from mid-20th-century scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset, Everett Carll Ladd, and Robert Bellah, who argued that the U.S. is held together not by shared bloodlines, religion, or language, but by a shared set of political ideals: what Lipset famously called the American Creed.
According to Lipset, the central components of this creed include:
Liberty
Egalitarianism
Individualism
Populism
Laissez-faire economics
These principles, Lipset argued, explain both America’s extraordinary stability and its exceptionalism. In fact, Lipset explicitly tied the American Creed to the exceptional character of the United States: it was a nation defined by ideas rather than blood, a country that could absorb immigrants and differences so long as all could agree on these ideological fundamentals.
Robert Bellah advanced a similar thesis in his essay "Civil Religion in America" (1967), describing how American political discourse is suffused with quasi-religious language and ritual. From the Declaration of Independence to presidential inaugurals to national holidays, Americans invoke a moral vision of the republic that transcends partisan politics.
This framework helps explain why Americans across regions, classes, and ethnicities often speak a common ideological language. It also explains why foundational texts—like the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address—retain such cultural power.
Yet the American Creed model also has blind spots. It often treats this ideological consensus as static and unchallenged, rather than dynamic and evolving. It can sound more like nostalgia than analysis. And it tends to understate the internal tensions within the creed itself—tensions that are as old as classical philosophy: liberty versus equality, individualism versus solidarity, majoritarian democracy versus minority rights. These are not bugs in the system; they are the oldest, most enduring questions in Western political thought. While they are correct that the American Ideology contains both an adherence to liberty/individualism/laissez-faire economics and egalitarianism, it fails to explain how.
And while Lipset and Ladd understood better than most the importance of nuance in these ideas, this approach lacks any systematic or analytic methodology for understanding, for instance, where “liberty” begins and “individualism” ends in its expression. The conceptual overlap leaves one with the impression we are defining the American Ideology by throwing spaghetti at the wall.
4. Ideology as Fragment or Fiction: America Without an Ideology
Finally, many (if not most) scholars have cast doubt on the very idea of a coherent American ideology, especially among more recent scholarship. In this post-liberal or postmodern view, American political culture is less a consistent philosophy than a shifting collage of myths, slogans, symbols, and rituals.
Historians like Daniel Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter warned against over-ideologizing American politics. Daniel J. Boorstin argued that explicit ideology and abstract theory are “foreign to America.” He believed the “genius” of U.S. political culture was to avoid rigid ideology altogether. In his famous essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter argued that American political movements are often driven less by coherent theory than by emotion, identity, and resentment.
Similarly, cultural critics like Lance Morrow or Joan Didion have described American ideology as a kind of narrative improvisation—a flexible mythology we update to suit our mood. In this view, Americans aren't ideological so much as eclectic. They borrow from the Bible, Jefferson, the Civil Rights Movement, Wall Street, and Woodstock all at once. What looks like a political philosophy is often just a rhetorical toolkit: we reach for the language of freedom, equality, or patriotism when we want to win an argument, but the meanings are slippery and contested.
In short, the predominant view among academics –from Marxists, mainstream historians, and postmodern analysts alike-has cast doubt on the coherence, or even the very existence, of a singular American ideology. They variously contend that U.S. politics is too contradictory, too manipulated by elites, too regionally and culturally fragmented, or too driven by narrative mythologies to sustain any unified, enduring ideology as an analytical reality. In addition to being the consensus view, this perspective also has explanatory power. It helps us understand why American political discourse can feel so volatile, why moral panics spread so quickly, and why symbols matter so much.
But it risks collapsing into cynicism. If American ideology is just performance or posturing, what explains the deep emotional and moral investments Americans have made in their national ideals? How to explain the evidence and data that explains how different we are in public perceptions and behaviors compared to other nations (i.e. “American exceptionalism”)? Why do liberty, equality, and the Constitution still stir such intense passion—not only among politicians, but among ordinary citizens?
More critically, this view can't account for the patterns of continuity in American history. Despite dramatic social and technological change, Americans keep returning to the same central debates: How do we balance liberty and equality? What is the proper scope of national authority? How should communities govern themselves? These are not random improvisations. They are recurring tensions, suggesting an underlying structure. The parchment documents in the Archive cannot do this work on its own.
Where That Leaves Us
Each of these schools of thought helps explain something essential about the American political tradition, and ultimately, the American Ideology.
Hartz showed us how deeply liberalism is embedded in our national identity, but mistook ideological dominance for ideological consensus.
Smith and Sandel helped us see the competing strands within our tradition, but offered conflict without a stable framework for coherence.
Lipset and Bellah gave us a portrait of national unity through shared ideals, but is too static to fully explain historical change.
Postmodern critics caution us not to become overwhelmed in our search for the Ideology by confirmation bias in its self-fulfilling propeshy. They remind us that politics is often performative and symbolic, but risk denying that Americans ever meant what they said.
What none of these models provide is a methodology for defining the American Ideology.
They either flatten it into one idea, fragment it into many, or give up on structure altogether. But the enduring themes of American political discourse have proven too consistent, and too generative, to be dismissed as either illusion or contradiction.
We need a better conceptualization—a framework that honors America’s complexity but still offers a structured, analytic approach to systematically define its enduring values. In other words, we need a way to think about American ideology that is plural but not incoherent, foundational but not static, contested but not nihilistic. A model that explains why Americans keep returning to certain debates—about liberty, equality, democracy, national purpose—and why those debates matter.
We need a better map. The work of drawing it begins by defining what we mean by “ideology,” and then applying a systematic approach to how we might define it for America. As we will see, the American Ideology reveals itself through the tensions that exist between core ideas across two separate dimensions.
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