Tautalus
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Many people today wonder what is happening in the United States, how a wave of intolerance, resentment, and national self-assertion seems to have taken hold of both politics and public life. I often hear the phrase: “this is not the America I used to know.” But perhaps that assumption, that there was only ever one America, is part of the misunderstanding.
Years ago, I read America Right or Wrong by Anatol Lieven, and it offered a framework that feels relevant today. Lieven argues that the United States has always had two faces.
One is the America we are most familiar with, represented by the “American Creed”, what he call’s the “American thesis”, built on ideals of liberty, equality, democracy, and openness, a country that sees itself as a model for the world.
The other is less often acknowledged but just as real, the American nationalist “antithesis”, with ethnoreligious roots, an identity driven America, rooted historically in regions like the South and Appalachia, shaped by religion, and deep attachment to nation. Their representative groups are mostly descendants of white Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish Protestant settlers who brought with them from Great Britain a history of intolerance and religious fanaticism.
This second America is not simply “backward” or reducible to prejudice, as it is sometimes portrayed. In Lieven’s view, it is also the product of loss, economic decline, the erosion of stable livelihoods, and a fading sense of cultural centrality. For many within it, modern America can feel like a place where their values are dismissed, their status diminished, and their identity questioned. The response is not just political, but emotional, a desire to restore dignity, to defend boundaries, to reassert a clear sense of who “we” are. This Jacksonian, nationalist America, has a deeply ambivalent and often hostile relationship with modernity.
From the book :
“America is also home to by far the largest and most powerful forces of fundamentalist religion in the developed world. The attitude of these forces toward key aspects of modernity as this is usually understood was summed up in the 1960s by the leading Pentecostalist preacher A. A. Allen: “The most treacherous foe in America isn’t Communism (as perilous as it may be), Nazism, Fascism or any alien ideology, but MODERNISM [capitals in the original].” This call to arms appeared in a booklet entitled My Vision of the Destruction of America. This title in itself brings out the contrast between the optimism of the American Creed and the profound pessimism of Protestant fundamentalism as far as progress in this world is concerned.”
Modernity is not just technology or progress, it includes things like globalisation, cultural liberalisation, diversity, secularism, and the growing influence of urban, educated elites. These changes tend to align with the “American Creed” (the thesis), but they often clash with the values of the antithesis.
The antithesis resists modernity in several interconnected ways. First, it sees modernity as eroding traditional identities and hierarchies. As society becomes more diverse and fluid, the older idea of a cohesive, culturally unified nation feels threatened. This produces a defensive reaction, a desire to reassert boundaries, traditions, and a stable sense of belonging.
Second, modernity is associated with elite control and cultural displacement. Institutions like universities, media, and global organizations promote values that feel alien or even hostile those communities. As a result, modernity is not experienced as neutral progress, but as something imposed from above, often with a tone of moral superiority.
Third, modernity is linked to economic disruption. Global markets and technological change undermine the kinds of jobs and local economies that sustained these communities. This reinforces the sense that modernity brings not opportunity, but loss of work, status, and dignity.
Because of all this, the antithesis tends to oppose its cultural and social dimensions. What emerges is a kind of tension, a willingness to use modern tools, but a resistance to the values and transformations that come with them.
Hence their attempt to slow down,reshape, or resist a version of modernity that feels disorienting, unjust, and threatening to its identity. That helps explain why its political expressions often emphasise restoration, of order, respect, and a clearer sense of who the nation is rather than adaptation to rapid change.
So the problem goes far beyond Donald Trump. Seen through this lens, his rise is less a rupture than a rebalancing. His rhetoric around “America First,” his emphasis on strength and sovereignty, and his attacks on elites and global institutions all resonate deeply with this older nationalist tradition. He did not invent it, if anything, it stretches back at least to Andrew Jackson, but he has amplified it and brought it to the centre of political power.
What we are witnessing, then, is not the disappearance of the America of the Creed, but a moment in which its counterpart has become more visible and more dominant. The tension between these two visions, America as an idea open to all, and America as a particular people to be defended, has always been there. Today, it is simply harder to ignore. This suggest that the current moment is less about a country losing its way, and more about a country revealing the depth of its internal contradictions that have been present all along.
Years ago, I read America Right or Wrong by Anatol Lieven, and it offered a framework that feels relevant today. Lieven argues that the United States has always had two faces.
One is the America we are most familiar with, represented by the “American Creed”, what he call’s the “American thesis”, built on ideals of liberty, equality, democracy, and openness, a country that sees itself as a model for the world.
The other is less often acknowledged but just as real, the American nationalist “antithesis”, with ethnoreligious roots, an identity driven America, rooted historically in regions like the South and Appalachia, shaped by religion, and deep attachment to nation. Their representative groups are mostly descendants of white Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish Protestant settlers who brought with them from Great Britain a history of intolerance and religious fanaticism.
This second America is not simply “backward” or reducible to prejudice, as it is sometimes portrayed. In Lieven’s view, it is also the product of loss, economic decline, the erosion of stable livelihoods, and a fading sense of cultural centrality. For many within it, modern America can feel like a place where their values are dismissed, their status diminished, and their identity questioned. The response is not just political, but emotional, a desire to restore dignity, to defend boundaries, to reassert a clear sense of who “we” are. This Jacksonian, nationalist America, has a deeply ambivalent and often hostile relationship with modernity.
From the book :
“America is also home to by far the largest and most powerful forces of fundamentalist religion in the developed world. The attitude of these forces toward key aspects of modernity as this is usually understood was summed up in the 1960s by the leading Pentecostalist preacher A. A. Allen: “The most treacherous foe in America isn’t Communism (as perilous as it may be), Nazism, Fascism or any alien ideology, but MODERNISM [capitals in the original].” This call to arms appeared in a booklet entitled My Vision of the Destruction of America. This title in itself brings out the contrast between the optimism of the American Creed and the profound pessimism of Protestant fundamentalism as far as progress in this world is concerned.”
Modernity is not just technology or progress, it includes things like globalisation, cultural liberalisation, diversity, secularism, and the growing influence of urban, educated elites. These changes tend to align with the “American Creed” (the thesis), but they often clash with the values of the antithesis.
The antithesis resists modernity in several interconnected ways. First, it sees modernity as eroding traditional identities and hierarchies. As society becomes more diverse and fluid, the older idea of a cohesive, culturally unified nation feels threatened. This produces a defensive reaction, a desire to reassert boundaries, traditions, and a stable sense of belonging.
Second, modernity is associated with elite control and cultural displacement. Institutions like universities, media, and global organizations promote values that feel alien or even hostile those communities. As a result, modernity is not experienced as neutral progress, but as something imposed from above, often with a tone of moral superiority.
Third, modernity is linked to economic disruption. Global markets and technological change undermine the kinds of jobs and local economies that sustained these communities. This reinforces the sense that modernity brings not opportunity, but loss of work, status, and dignity.
Because of all this, the antithesis tends to oppose its cultural and social dimensions. What emerges is a kind of tension, a willingness to use modern tools, but a resistance to the values and transformations that come with them.
Hence their attempt to slow down,reshape, or resist a version of modernity that feels disorienting, unjust, and threatening to its identity. That helps explain why its political expressions often emphasise restoration, of order, respect, and a clearer sense of who the nation is rather than adaptation to rapid change.
So the problem goes far beyond Donald Trump. Seen through this lens, his rise is less a rupture than a rebalancing. His rhetoric around “America First,” his emphasis on strength and sovereignty, and his attacks on elites and global institutions all resonate deeply with this older nationalist tradition. He did not invent it, if anything, it stretches back at least to Andrew Jackson, but he has amplified it and brought it to the centre of political power.
What we are witnessing, then, is not the disappearance of the America of the Creed, but a moment in which its counterpart has become more visible and more dominant. The tension between these two visions, America as an idea open to all, and America as a particular people to be defended, has always been there. Today, it is simply harder to ignore. This suggest that the current moment is less about a country losing its way, and more about a country revealing the depth of its internal contradictions that have been present all along.
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