The Series: What to Expect
Over the next several months, I’ll be proposing an analytic model—a methodology—for discovering, understanding, and defining what I call the American Ideology. In weekly posts, I’ll reveal the framework behind this model, explore its roots in political thought and American history, and reflect on its relevance to the challenges we face today.
Below you’ll find a working outline for the series. Much of this content began as an unfinished dissertation I started writing three decades ago. It’s being rewritten in real time, updated both for historical accuracy and for our current political moment. So the outline is not only subject to change—it’s likely to.
I am hoping you will join me in real conversation. I’ll host live Q&A chats for those of you who want to talk in more depth about the materal I’m sharing. And if no one shows up, I’ll happily talk to myself for half an hour.
I also encourage you to check out the website where I am hosting an actual online course and starting an ambitious survey research project to measure Americans’ attachment to the ideology.
Thanks for joining me!
Bryan Dumont
AMERICAN IDEOLOGY: WORKING OUTLINE
MODULE I. FOUNDATIONS OF IDEOLOGY
This module sets the conceptual groundwork, clarifies the stakes, and establishes the need for a new analytic model.
1. American Ideologue?
Introduces the project and its provocations. Outlines the goals of this project. Challenges modern cynicism about ideology and stakes the claim that America has one.
2. Bowling Alone and Reagan’s Warning: The Dying Ideology
A personal narrative rooted in Bellah, Putnam, and Ladd. Establishes the cultural infrastructure necessary for ideology to function.
3. The Science of Ideas: Defining Ideology
Defines ideology as a dual system (normative + operational). Separates ideology from partisanship, movements, and opinion. Includes historical grounding in de Tracy, Marx, and contemporary political theory.
3A. America’s Non-Ideological Parties
For much of our history, parties appeared curiously idea-less. They were reactive rather than visionary, transactional rather than transformational. For a nation founded on ideas, how is it that its political parties are non-ideological?
4. In Search of the American Ideology
Survey of major intellectual schools: Hartz, Lipset, Ladd, Smith, Bellah, Sandel, Hofstadter. The need for an analytic model.
MODULE II. THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY REVEALED
“The Methodology.” Revealing a new systematic approach to discovering, understanding and defining the American Ideology.
5. A Framework for the American Ideology
Introduces the two-axis analytic model that defines the American Ideology. Together, these axes give rise to four cardinal values at the center—values that synthesize these tensions into a coherent system.
6. Communitarian Individualism
Explores the American expression of liberty—not as unbounded autonomy, but as liberty constrained by moral obligation, civic duty, and belonging.
6A. The First American Synthesis: Liberty, Equality, and the Origins of Communitarian Individualism
6B. The Five Habits of American Liberty: Freedom’s Architecture-The Five Traits That Define Communitarian Individualism
6C. America at a Standstill: What the Decline in Mobility Means for the American Ideology
6D: We Were Never Lockeans: The Puritan legacy in shaping the American Ideology.
7. Moral Equality
Here we examine the American interpretation of equality influenced by the religious tradition of its earliest settlers as much as by Enlightenment philosophy.
7A. Original Sin: A brief and personal prelude to moral equality
7B. The Apple of Gold: The Second Synthesis of the American Ideology: Equality as Liberty’s elusive twin—a synthesis delayed.
7C. Beyond Athens & Jerusalem: The American Ideology emerges from a different tension; not liberty & order, but liberty & equality.
7D. The Death of Decency: Decency is essential to moral equality
8. Republicanism
Not the party, but the philosophical and institutional tradition: a belief in constitutional government, civic virtue, the rule of law, and liberty preserved through structure.
9. Federalism
More than a legal arrangement, federalism is a structural value rooted in pluralism, decentralization, and a distrust of concentrated power.
10. When the Balance Breaks
Examines what happens when America loses balance away from ideological equilibrium. It outlines the political, social and cultural pathologies that emerge when the core tensions are resolved in favor of one pole.
MODULE III: IDEOLOGICAL EPOCHS
Demonstrating the model across American history—how each era emphasized a quadrant of the ideological map, and what it reveals about continuity, correction, and crisis.
11. The Seven Ideological Epochs (Overview Post)
Introduces the model’s historical explanatory power. Frames the epochs as successive recalibrations across the two axes. Introduces the concept of ideological “quadrants.”
12–18. Epoch Spotlights (One post per era)
Each post explores one quadrant in action and one epoch in detail, including:
The Early Republic
The Middle Period
The Grand Alignment
The Progressive Era
The New Deal Order
The Conservative Realignment
The Dealignment
MODULE IV: RENEWAL OR COLLAPSE
Connects the model to the present: what happens when we forget the center of balance, and how we might return to it.
19. America, Exceptional No More?
An honest appraisal of American Exceptionalism and the evidence once pointed to that demonstrated how unique we were from the rest of the world.
20. The Dark Side of the American Ideology
The American Ideology has never been treated by serious scholars as a celebration of American superiority. Here we explore the negative consequences of our ideological biases.
21. Civic Ritual and Ideological Catechesis
The need for civic catechesis. Institutions, rituals, education, and social capital as ideological transmission mechanisms.
22. The Government’s Not Broken, We Are
Diagnosis of the current moment: cultural decay, institutional distrust, ideological fragmentation.
23. Can the American Ideology Survive without Religion?
The recent cratering of the last vestige of American Exceptionalism. Perhaps the greatest and most dire challenge.
24. Vox Americana
Do we still believe? An exploration of public opinion data to shed light on Americans’ attachment to the ideology.
25. The Politics of Revival
Not centrism—but ideological recovery. What it would mean to build a political movement based on the ideological values, not partisan platforms.