The Two Souls of America

[Tautalus]

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.

 

[Vallicanus]

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.

Excellent summary!
The two souls worldwide, not just the USA, are,on the one hand, progress or modernity if you will. The other side is a rigid, hierarchical society where everybody is locked into a specific social position willy-nilly...a sociological groundhog day. Millions prefer this second option for good or ill.

Another good book on the subject is "American Nations" by Colin Woodard.

 

[Tautalus]

Another good book on the subject is "American Nations" by Colin Woodard.

It will be one of my next reads.

 

[Vallicanus]

It will be one of my next reads.

"American Nations" (from 2011 but still valid) splits up the USA into no less than 11 regions with different origins and different attitudes.
These social attitudes are reflected in voting tendencies.

I suppose the 2 extremes are best represented by what this book calls "Yankeedom" and the "Deep South".

Let me know what you think of Woodard's book. Certainly I found it to be a fascinating read and a LOT rang true for me.

 

[Tautalus]

"American Nations" (from 2011 but still valid) splits up the USA into no less than 11 regions with different origins and different attitudes.
These social attitudes are reflected in voting tendencies.

I suppose the 2 extremes are best represented by what this book calls "Yankeedom" and the "Deep South".

Let me know what you think of Woodard's book. Certainly I found it to be a fascinating read and a LOT rang true for me.

I already have the book, it should take me at least three weeks to read it.

 

[Tautalus]

American Nations is a very good book. The greatest contribution of reading these two books together is that they explain different aspects of the same phenomenon. Woodard explains where America's political cultures came from by tracing them back to the original settlement of North America. Lieven explains how those cultures have evolved into two enduring ideological visions competing for the nation's identity. In many ways, Woodard provides the historical geography, while Lieven provides the political philosophy. Together, they explain that the divisions visible in the United States today are not recent developments but the continuation of cultural traditions that have existed since the colonial era.

If I try to fit these 11 nations into the two souls described by Lieven, the regions that most closely align with the American Creed are Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Left Coast, and, to a lesser extent, the Midlands. Yankeedom inherited the Puritan emphasis on education, civic responsibility, institutional reform, and the belief that society can and should be improved. New Netherland, centered on New York, developed from the Dutch tradition of commerce, religious tolerance, diversity, and openness to immigrants. The Left Coast inherited much of Yankeedom's reformist spirit, combined with a strong sense of innovation and social liberalism. The Midlands, founded largely by Quakers and German settlers, tends to value moderation, pluralism, compromise, and peaceful coexistence. Together, these regions represent the America that defines itself through universal ideals such as liberty, democracy, equality, and inclusion.

The Jacksonian antithesis is rooted primarily in Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, and, historically, Tidewater. Greater Appalachia, settled largely by Scots-Irish border families, developed a culture centered on personal honor, military service, evangelical religion, fierce independence, and distrust of distant authority. These are precisely the characteristics that Lieven identifies as the heart of Jacksonian America. The Deep South adds a tradition of hierarchy, a racial caste system, conservative social values, and a strong emphasis on local identity and historical continuity. Tidewater contributes an older aristocratic tradition that values status, leadership, and regional loyalty. Together, these regions form the historical and cultural foundation of the nationalist America that Lieven describes.

The remaining nations occupy a more ambiguous position. El Norte, New France, and the Far West do not fit neatly into either category. El Norte possesses a strong regional identity but has long been multicultural and adaptable. New France emphasizes community, cooperation, and social solidarity rather than either American universalism or Jacksonian nationalism. The Far West is characterized by individualism and skepticism toward centralized government, but this attitude is rooted more in frontier conditions than in the honor based nationalism of Appalachia.

Instead of asking why Americans seem so divided today, Woodard argues that the real surprise is that such culturally different societies have managed to remain within the same political union for so long. In the end, America is always more complex than initially thought.

Today, America seems to have evolved into something more radical. It is no longer simply divided between liberals and conservatives, but is increasingly defined by the erosion of the liberal center and the mutual radicalization of both the progressive left and the nationalist right. Both sides have gradually abandoned the broad civic consensus that dominated much of the twentieth century and instead define themselves through opposition to one another. The progressive left has increasingly embraced identity politics and cultural activism, while the nationalist right seeks to restore what it sees as America's traditional values, national cohesion, religious heritage, and cultural identity. Each movement presents itself as a reaction to the excesses of the other, creating a cycle in which polarization feeds upon itself. Economic inequality, globalization, demographic change, declining social mobility, and growing distrust of political, media, and academic elites have all reinforced this process. The result is a country in which compromise has become increasingly difficult, the political center has steadily weakened, and the struggle is no longer simply over policies, but over competing visions of what America is, what it should become, and even what it means to be American.

One reason not to be overly pessimistic is that the United States has repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for reinvention. Throughout its history, moments of profound polarization and internal conflict have often been followed by the emergence of a new national synthesis. The Civil War ultimately produced a stronger Union and a renewed commitment to constitutional liberty. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way, over time, to a broader understanding of civil rights and a more inclusive civic identity. America's strength has often lain not in avoiding contradictions, but in absorbing them and transforming them into new political and social arrangements.

Whether the current crisis will follow the same pattern remains uncertain. Today's divisions are deep and increasingly rooted in competing visions of history, identity, and the nation's future. Yet American history suggests that periods of intense conflict do not necessarily end in decline. More often, they force the country to redefine itself, producing a new equilibrium that incorporates elements of the competing visions. The question is not whether America will change, it always has, but whether it can once again forge a synthesis capable of reconciling liberty with identity, diversity with national cohesion, and tradition with modernity. Its past offers reasons for cautious optimism, even if its future remains impossible to predict.​