A Framework for the American Ideology

Introducing the Two-Dimensional Model of Tensional Ideas

Bryan Dumont

May 15, 2025

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NOTE: THIS WILL BE MUCH MORE EDIFYING WITH THE BENEFIT OF THE CONTEXT PROVIDED IN THE FIRST “MODULE’. START HERE!

SHORT OVERVIEW OF THE FRAMEWORK

Any attempt to define anew the American Ideology should begin with a fair amount of humility, fully aware of the shoes being filled. The thousand words or so I used in the last chapter to highlight both the contributions and shortcomings of the body of scholarship around this topic cannot come close to doing justice to these academic giants. From Louis Hartz’s groundbreaking work—The Liberal Tradition in America—to the work of my own mentor (Everett Carll Ladd) and his frequent collaborator (Seymour Martin Lipset), my contribution can aspire to no more than incremental improvement at best. What I am proposing is not an alternative definition or a new theory. Instead, I am offering a framework through which we can more systematically define and interpret the American Ideology.

I deliberately began by clearly defining ideology itself. In doing so, the framework of an American Ideology becomes almost self-evident (excuse the pun). I posited that what makes an ideology an ideology—as opposed to a philosophy, a movement, or a political/partisan orientation—is the combination of a coherent system of normative beliefs about how society should be organized, paired with a methodology for realizing those beliefs.

In the case of the American Ideology, these two dimensions are not at all abstract. In fact, they are very visible and known by almost every American: our two founding documents themselves. The Declaration of Independence is our statement of normative values—an articulation of our creed. The Constitution is our blueprint for putting those values into practice. Together, they reflect an ideological structure unlike anything that came before, and arguably the first true ideology in the modern sense.

Each dimension is a continuum bounded at each end by what I call “tensional” ideas.

The Philosophical Axis: Liberty and Equality

If we are to define the philosophical core of the American Ideology, we must begin with the few words that articulate the American creed itself:

THE AMERICAN CREED:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This sentence is not merely a rhetorical flourish. It is the ideological DNA of the American project—a distillation of centuries of moral and political thought, condensing classical natural law theory, Enlightenment philosophy, Protestant ethics, and lived American experience.

Its primary source, of course, is John Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government laid out the idea that individuals possess natural rights prior to the formation of government—and that the role of government is to protect those rights, not grant them. But Jefferson and the Founders drew not only from Locke. Liberty and equality were at the very center of Enlightenment philosophy for centuries and classical antiquity for millennia. Where we come to see how these ubiquitous ideas take a uniquely American form is in how the colonists and their ancestors experienced and understood them.

Indeed, as Calvin Coolidge observed in his 1926 speech marking the 150th anniversary of the Declaration, these ideas had taken root in America long before the Revolution: “They were found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the colonial clergy.” In Coolidge’s view, the Declaration did not introduce a foreign philosophy; it affirmed a lived American reality. “They are ideals which were born of the spirit of the people,” he said, “and they have been sustained by their experience.”

The ideals of liberty and equality were not imposed on the American people from the Enlightenment salons of Europe; they were articulated by thinkers who recognized them already at work in the daily life, religious convictions, and civic structures of the colonies. Liberty and equality had become normative experiences before they were written into law. That makes them not just philosophical abstractions but cultural realities, shaping how Americans understood their rights, duties, and each other.

It is the relationship between these two ideas, as much as their individual meanings, that helps us understand the American Ideology. Returning to the one-sentence creed—which does an enormous amount of work—it affirms the equal moral status of all individuals (“created equal”), grounds that status in a natural and transcendent order (“endowed by their Creator”), and then articulates the core individual rights that flow from that status (“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”). Liberty and equality are not competing goods here; they are mutually reinforcing. It is because we are equal that each of us possesses liberty, and it is through liberty that the equal dignity of the individual is given form.

The tension between liberty and equality in American thought is thus not a matter of rivalry. It is a creative tension—one that insists neither value can be sustained without the other. Liberty without equality risks devolving into privilege or license. Equality without liberty risks becoming coercive or flattening. But liberty and equality held in balance can produce a moral and civic order in which individuals are both free and bound—free in their conscience and activity, bound by a shared dignity and reciprocal obligation.

The most important implication of this axis is that American ideological development should not be understood as a seesaw between liberty and equality. Rather, it should be understood as a continual recalibration of their interdependence. When one value appears ascendant, it is often because its constraints have become obscured. When one is neglected, it is because its role in maintaining the balance has been forgotten. The philosophical axis of the American Ideology is a system of mutual containment: each value empowering, checking, and requiring the other.

The Declaration of Independence begins with a universal claim of equality—that “all men are created equal”—but quickly asserts the purpose of government as securing liberty through unalienable rights. The Constitution, in turn, was written to “secure the blessings of liberty,” but it also sought to “form a more perfect union”—a collective good that implies shared standards, fairness, and balance.

From the outset, then, American political thought was a negotiation between two values: equality as moral premise, and liberty as political purpose. They coexist, but they also compete: how do you secure liberty for the individual and equality for all?

The tension between liberty and equality is not a flaw. It is the defining feature of American political life. In fact, it gives American ideology its moral range. Liberty and equality encompass many ideas defining American life: laissez-faire economics, individualism balanced by communal obligations, egalitarianism tempered by liberty, and populism balanced by constitutional constraints.

Although these two tensional ideas are not exhaustive of all American thought, they are capacious enough to contain its deepest debates. That is why they anchor the philosophical axis of the American Ideology. This axis gives us a framework wide enough to contain the ideological diversity of American history, but bounded enough to prevent incoherence. It does not collapse into moral relativism. Rather, it structures the debates themselves. It tells us where the lines are drawn—and where they might be redrawn.

The Structural Tension Between the National Idea and the Democratic Idea

If the Declaration of Independence provides the philosophical blueprint of the American Ideology, the Constitution provides its structural form. Where the Declaration articulates the moral ends of the regime, the Constitution establishes the means by which those ends are secured. The tension between the Democratic Idea and the National Idea arises precisely at this point: how should authority be distributed and exercised to secure liberty and equality in a pluralistic republic?

This structural tension was first fully theorized by Herbert Croly in his seminal work, The Promise of American Life. Croly observed that American political development could be understood as the ongoing interplay between two competing principles. Croly’s framing—the Democratic Idea and the National Idea—is one of the most underappreciated contributions to American political thought. It captures the full sweep of America’s institutional and procedural tensions: local vs. federal, direct vs. representative, majoritarian vs. constitutional, participatory vs. administrative. These tensions are not simply abstract design principles; they structure everything from the Senate and Electoral College to the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the regulatory state, and today’s polarized discourse about federalism, populism, and executive power.

The Democratic Idea emphasizes local control, participatory self-government, and the sovereignty of the people. It finds expression in institutions such as townships, state legislatures, and popular elections, animated by a belief in the virtue and responsibility of ordinary citizens. It is the legacy of Jefferson, of the town meeting, and of Tocqueville’s civic associations. It embodies American commitment to pluralism and a conviction that government should reflect and remain close to the governed.

The National Idea, by contrast, stresses centralized authority, institutional coherence, and a national commitment to justice and unity. It is Hamiltonian in origin but Lincolnian in its moral ambition. It finds expression in federal authority, national standards, and the belief that some purposes—especially the protection of rights—require action beyond the local. Croly argued that while Jeffersonian democracy emphasized equality through the dispersion of power, Hamiltonian nationalism emphasized justice through the concentration of responsibility. Neither tradition was sufficient on its own. The American Ideology, Croly insisted, arises from the management of their tension.

What makes Croly’s formulation so enduring is that it was offered not only as a diagnosis of a single era. Rather, it was an attempt to capture the structural logic of American governance from the Founding forward. The Constitution itself institutionalizes this tension. It creates a compound republic—a federal system with enumerated national powers and reserved state powers. It blends representation by population (in the House) with representation by state (in the Senate). It establishes a presidency that can act nationally, but only through channels authorized and constrained by local representatives and constitutional limits.

To speak of the National Idea and the Democratic Idea is thus not to trace a political pendulum, but to recognize a permanent dialectic in American constitutionalism. The American state is neither fully unitary nor fully confederal. It is a dynamic tension designed to channel local energies into national purpose, and national commitments into local practice.

This tension, like the philosophical axis, is generative when managed well and destabilizing when distorted. The excesses of populist localism—when the Democratic Idea becomes unmoored from national purpose—can result in parochialism, exclusion, and the tyranny of the majority. The excesses of centralization—when the National Idea becomes detached from local legitimacy—can produce bureaucratic overreach or authoritarian drift. But held together, these ideas produce a federal system capable of responsiveness and cohesion, self-rule, and common purpose.

These tensions were not just theoretical; they were front and center during the drafting of the Constitution. The United States had just emerged from a failed experiment in confederation. The Articles of Confederation proved inadequate to governing a large and diverse republic. The challenge facing the framers was constructing a government strong enough to act, yet limited enough to remain accountable to the people.

Their answer was not a unitary state, but a compound republic, as James Madison described it in Federalist No. 39: part federal, part national—a delicate balance of sovereign states and central authority. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay turned to classical and Enlightenment sources to make their case: Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws emphasized the separation of powers and mixed government; Polybius, who saw balance as the secret to Rome’s durability; and the English Whigs, whose distrust of tyranny—whether from a king or popular majority—shaped their theory of checks and balances.

Indeed, the Federalist Papers are obsessed with tyranny—not just of kings, but of factions, mobs, and even well-meaning majorities. The purpose of constitutional structure was to tame democratic passion through institutional design: staggered terms, bicameralism, judicial review, and federalism. It was a system built to channel—but not silence—the voice of the people, to empower but also to constrain.

This structural tension also reflects a polarity: push too far toward democratic immediacy, and you risk destabilizing the system through populism, factionalism, or mob rule. Push too far toward national centralization, and you risk bureaucratic overreach or detachment from the people. Both poles express legitimate concerns—and both, unrestrained, represent dangers.

That’s why Croly’s language is so powerful. It doesn’t just name institutions; it names the underlying ideas that animate them. The American political tradition isn’t merely a catalog of compromises—it’s a dynamic balance of ideals that must constantly be held in tension.

Together with the liberty-equality axis, the axis between the Democratic Idea and National Idea gives us a second dimension—one that explains not just what Americans believe, but how they attempt to realize those beliefs.

A Coherent Ideology from Creative Tensions

The genius of the American Ideology is that it does not attempt to eliminate or collapse these tensions. It institutionalizes them. It builds a moral and political order not on unanimity but on managing competing truths. Liberty and equality are held in moral tension, generating a civic ethic of mutual respect and reciprocal duty. The Democratic and National Ideas are not merged into a singular structure; they are held in institutional tension, creating a system that is simultaneously participatory and principled, pluralistic and unified.

This dual-axis model offers a powerful heuristic for understanding American political development. It allows us to read history not as a zigzag between ideologies but as recalibrations within a single ideological framework. It also allows us to diagnose the present moment not simply as a crisis of partisanship or policy, but as a deeper failure to sustain the moral and structural tensions defining the American Idea.

Each of the poles represents a distortion of the American Ideology—a case where one principle overpowers its counterbalance. What makes the American Ideology enduring is not commitment to any single value in isolation, but commitment to keeping these values in equilibrium.

In the chapters that follow, we will explore what emerges when these tensions are balanced through a dialectic process producing a synthesis of “cardinal values” that best define this ideology. But we begin here, with the two axes that provide a systematic and analytic framework for the American Ideology: a system of creative tensions, grounded in a creed, and given form through a constitution.

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