The Five Habits of American Liberty
Freedom’s Architecture: The Five Traits That Define Communitarian Individualism
In The First American Synthesis, we traced how communitarian individualism emerged from the lived experience of Americans striving to reconcile liberty and equality—from the covenantal order of the Puritans to the self-organized settlements of frontier pioneers and immigrant neighborhoods. What follows is a closer look at the five most enduring expressions of communitarian individualism —five civic habits1 that gave the American Ideology its form, and that just might hold the key to its renewal.
1. COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT: FROM TOCQUEVILLE’S ASSOCIATIONS TO PUTNAM’S BOWLING ALONE
One of the clearest expressions of America’s fusion of individual initiative with communal life is its longstanding culture of voluntary association. From the earliest days of the republic, Americans displayed an unusual propensity to form and join organizations—not only churches and schools, but clubs, lodges, improvement societies, and countless informal committees. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, was struck by the ubiquity and diversity of these groups. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all minds constantly unite,” he observed. For Tocqueville, this associational impulse was more than a cultural curiosity; it was the secret to how liberty and equality were sustained outside of government.
The Americans, Tocqueville noted, did not wait for government or aristocracy to solve problems. If a need arose—a school to build, a road to repair, a festival to organize—they formed a committee. These associations taught practical democratic skills: cooperation, negotiation, compromise, leadership, and followership. In contrast to Europe, where central authority or noble patronage handled many public concerns, Americans handled them together. Tocqueville understood this habit as a civic education in self-rule—an institutional embodiment of “self-interest rightly understood,” the American doctrine that small, daily acts of cooperation for the common good also advanced one’s private well-being.
This tradition endured. By the mid-twentieth century, American civic life still pulsed with voluntary energy. In 1944, historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. called Americans a “nation of joiners.” Yet by the late twentieth century, alarm bells began to ring. Robert Putnam’s seminal 1995 essay, “Bowling Alone,” and his subsequent book, diagnosed a sharp decline in America’s civic participation. Putnam documented falling membership in nearly every form of voluntary organization: unions, churches, neighborhood associations, and yes, bowling leagues. For Putnam, this shift reflected a broader atomization: declining social capital, thinner civic networks, and a fraying sense of collective responsibility.
If communitarian individualism has a defining attribute, it begins here: in the voluntary choice to bind oneself to others, not out of coercion, but because freedom only flourishes when lived in common.
2. MORAL CONFORMITY
Alongside its culture of voluntary association, American life has long been shaped by peer-regulated behavior—a preference for enforcing moral norms through informal, communal means rather than through centralized authority. From colonial villages to modern digital networks, Americans have relied on social pressure, reputational consequence, and communal judgment to maintain order. This habit, too, is a central expression of communitarian individualism: it reflects a civic orientation in which freedom is not unbounded, but constantly negotiated through shared expectations.
Tocqueville famously noted that while America was politically freer than Europe, it was socially more constrained. “I know of no country,” he wrote, “in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” What he observed was not state censorship, but the pressure of majority opinion—a cultural tendency to enforce conformity even in the absence of legal mandate.
In small towns, churches, and neighborhoods, Americans developed strong systems of social sanction—rewarding those who upheld local norms and punishing those who deviated. These sanctions were often moral in character, even when economic or reputational in effect. A drunkard, adulterer, or dishonest businessman might find himself excluded from polite society, denied credit, or shamed in public spaces. Conversely, a person known for reliability, sobriety, or charity would earn the trust and goodwill of the community.
This cultural tradition of moral conformity explains why the United States remains one of the most socially conservative societies in the developed world—not despite its liberal commitments, but because of how liberty has always been tethered to communal moral expectations. Americans are far more likely than their peers in Western Europe to moralize private behavior, to draw clear lines around propriety, and to enforce those lines through social pressure rather than legal fiat. The instinct to maintain cohesion through shared judgment is not an accident of geography or theology—it is a structural feature of a civic culture that places moral authority close to the ground.
This enduring puritanical reflex—rooted in a Protestant civic imagination, but no longer confined to religious traditions—has migrated across the political spectrum. On the right, it continues to animate campaigns to regulate sexuality, family structure, and education. But the left has developed its own version of this logic. In progressive circles, moral purity now orients around issues of identity, justice, and harm. Certain words, ideas, and associations are deemed not merely offensive but intolerable, requiring correction, public apology, or exclusion. Social media intensifies this dynamic, turning informal censure into high-speed collective discipline.
When functioning well, peer regulation can uphold virtue, discourage antisocial behavior, and reduce the need for formal coercion. But when it hardens into orthodoxy or becomes unmoored from pluralism, it punishes difference and incentivizes conformity. This is the shadow side of communitarian individualism: a culture that empowers communities to maintain moral order must also live with the risk that they will demand too much agreement. The Puritan legacy was not just religious—it was civic. It taught Americans to expect that freedom would be exercised in community, but also to fear what happens when the community stops tolerating dissent. That legacy endures—not only in our politics, but in the structure of our civic imagination.
3. SKEPTICISM OF GOVERNMENT
One of the most widely recognized features of the American Ideology is a deep-rooted skepticism of government power—especially when that power is perceived as remote or centralized. But this skepticism is often misunderstood. It is not simply a reflexive anti-statism, nor a resistance to all forms of governance. Rather, it reflects a deeper ideological tradition: that wherever possible, society’s needs should be addressed by free individuals and their local associations. From the Revolution to the present, Americans have resisted distant authority not only because it threatens autonomy, but because it is seen as crowding out the moral obligations that citizens owe one another directly. This distinctive posture toward the state can be traced to three interlocking roots: Lockean liberalism, communitarian moral responsibility, and what Louis Hartz described as the American “absence of feudalism.”
The first root is the Lockean tradition of limited government, which profoundly shaped the Founding. In Locke’s framework, government exists solely to protect individual rights—life, liberty, and property—and otherwise must leave individuals free to govern themselves. This vision found expression in the Declaration of Independence and in Jefferson’s call for “a wise and frugal Government” that prevents harm but leaves people “otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits.” In this tradition, legitimate government restrains violence, enforces contracts, and defends borders—but it does not manage private life or dictate moral development. Any state that drifts beyond this narrow role risks losing its legitimacy in the American mind.
This Lockean minimalism remains a persistent feature of American political attitudes. Public opinion regularly affirms support for government in core functions—law enforcement, courts, and national defense—but resists broader interventions in private or economic life. Surveys show Americans less supportive than Europeans of redistribution, guaranteed income, or state-directed welfare. This is not necessarily hostility to government per se. It is skepticism that government can or should do more than secure liberty. Programs that go beyond that—however well-intentioned—trigger cultural alarms about paternalism and dependency.
The second root of American skepticism is communitarian rather than liberal: a moral imperative that views direct, personal responsibility as superior to distant bureaucracy. In this view, turning to the state to care for a neighbor is not just inefficient—it is morally suspect. As Tocqueville observed, Americans formed associations “of a thousand kinds” to meet common needs, rather than appeal to the state. Helping the poor, educating the young, or tending to the sick was understood not as the state’s duty, but as the community’s shared burden. In this cultural framework, outsourcing moral obligations to bureaucracies feels not only impersonal, but irresponsible.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a rural county in Ohio imposed restrictions on funeral gatherings to limit viral spread. One local pastor—fully vaccinated and supportive of masking—chose to defy the rules. When asked why, he didn’t draw arguments from the libertarian (and deeply un-American) fringe. He simply said: “I don’t need the government telling me how to bury my own.” For many observers, that reaction may seem irrational or even reckless. But it was not about rejecting science or asserting individual rights. It was about moral boundaries. For many Americans, certain responsibilities—caring for the dead, gathering in grief, showing up for one another—belong to the community, not the state. What was being resisted wasn’t policy, but the idea that something so intimate and sacred could be regulated from afar.
We mistake this kind of resistance for fringe “ideology,” when in fact it draws from an even deeper ideology that reflects a civic intuition shared across political lines: that some domains of life must remain in the hands of those closest. The language may differ, but the values are broadly recognizable. What appears as hostility to government is often a defense of responsibility. If we miss that motivation, we misunderstand not just this response, but a long-standing thread of the American tradition—one in which skepticism of government arises not from contempt, but from reverence for what communities owe each other directly.
This moral vision of civic life still resonates. Surveys show that Americans remain far more likely than Europeans to prioritize freedom over state guarantees of welfare—reinforcing that their skepticism of government is moral as much as functional. Even today, many Americans view communal care—delivered through churches, charities, or local networks—not only as more effective, but as more humane. This conviction is moral, not just functional. It is grounded in the belief that real compassion is proximate, not bureaucratic.
The third and most foundational root is what Hartz called the “liberal fragment” thesis: the idea that America never developed a feudal past, and therefore never developed the habit of “looking up” for solutions. Unlike European societies, where aristocrats or central governments traditionally bore responsibility for public welfare, early Americans relied on each other from the outset. With no memory of being ruled by benevolent lords, Americans did not grow to expect protection or provision from above. Instead, they looked laterally—to families, churches, and neighbors. This ingrained cultural posture became one of the deepest sources of American non-reliance on centralized authority.
This also clarifies why it is inaccurate to describe Americans as reflexively “anti-government.” In fact, the institutions with which Americans have consistently expressed the highest levels of trust are within the government: the U.S. military and law enforcement routinely command greater public confidence than business, media and Congress. Americans support government when it plays its historical role as protector, referee, or guarantor of individual rights. What they resist is the idea that government should replace communities in performing the work of moral and civic life.
In that sense, American skepticism of centralized authority is not an anomaly. It is another way Americans demonstrate the synthesis of communitarian individualism as a structural feature of the American Ideology—a defense mechanism that protects the space in which liberty and responsibility are supposed to flourish. From Locke’s limits on the state, to the communitarian imperative of neighborly obligation, to Hartz’s insight that we never learned to look upward for help, the result is clear. Americans want a government that secures liberty, but they still expect communities to do the rest.
4. CAPITALISM, THE PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC, AND THE MORAL ECONOMY
Economic individualism—the right to pursue one’s livelihood freely and accumulate property—has always been a core element of American liberty. Unlike in many societies where capitalism emerged amid longstanding state hierarchies or collectivist traditions, American capitalism was born into a culture that prized self-reliance, enterprise, and moral autonomy. The United States has long been the most natural—and arguably most fervent—environment for capitalism to thrive. But this system did not develop in a moral vacuum. From the beginning, it was shaped by the cultural inheritance of Protestantism and the communal expectations of small-town and religious life. What emerged was not a rejection of capitalism, but a distinctive version of it: one in which work was seen as a true calling, success a sign of character, and wealth a responsibility to others. American capitalism has never fully balanced liberty and obligation—but it has always lived with the tension between them.
Max Weber’s classic formulation of the Protestant work ethic offers a window into this worldview. Early American Protestants—particularly Calvinists—believed that hard work, thrift, and vocational discipline were not just practical virtues, but spiritual imperatives. In Puritan New England, the industrious man was seen as fulfilling his divine duty, while idleness signaled moral failing. Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms—“Early to bed and early to rise,” “God helps those who help themselves”—reflected a moralized view of economic life in which effort, not entitlement, earned dignity.
But this ethic, though rooted in individual drive, was constantly mediated by community norms. In small towns and close-knit religious communities, business behavior was monitored not only by the market but by the congregation. A merchant who gouged customers or a farmer who shirked his duties could lose more than profit—he could lose the trust and standing that made commerce possible. Economic success was respected, but only when earned honorably. Community members extended credit, forgave debts, and rallied to help those in hardship—not because it was efficient, but because it was expected. Protestantism didn’t demand that wealth be rejected—it demanded that it be used with restraint and directed toward others. This is the beginning of America’s moral economy: a capitalist system shaped, however imperfectly, by shared values.
That moral economy was most visible in the rise of American philanthropy. From Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, the nation’s most successful capitalists were often also its most generous. Carnegie’s famous dictum—that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced”—was less an act of contrition than a statement of civic ideology. Wealth, in the American tradition, was a sign of discipline and capacity, but it came with an obligation to give back. This was not state-enforced redistribution; it was voluntary, reputationally important, and often locally grounded. Foundations, libraries, hospitals, and schools were built not out of guilt but out of a belief that private wealth should serve public ends. This tradition continues today, from community foundations to mega-philanthropy, always orbiting around a tacit agreement: capitalism earns its legitimacy by serving something beyond itself.
The communitarian individualism ethos also explains our deeply-held admiration for small business and the individual entrepreneurs over large corporations. Nowhere else in the developed world has small business played such a central role—not just economically, but culturally. To this day, small businesses remain the dominant employer in the United States, accounting for half of private-sector jobs. This reflects more than structural market conditions; it reflects a national ideology that prizes independence, self-employment, and community-rooted enterprise.
The American embrace of capitalism has always tilted heavily toward the individualist side of the equation. When inequality or exploitation reached unsustainable levels—as during the Gilded Age or the Great Depression—communitarian correctives emerged: the Populists organizing rural resistance to banks and railroads; the Progressives pushing for labor protections and business ethics codes; civil rights leaders in the 1960s linking economic justice to moral duty. Communitarian restraint was the exception, not the norm, but it remained an expected boundary.
In moments of crisis such as the 2008 financial collapse Americans never called for the abolition of capitalism (except for a brief protest by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement). They still expect the marketplace to reward honesty, responsibility, and effort. They still believe that economic freedom should not be severed from civic responsibility. And they still look to business leaders, not government alone, to help repair what is broken.
5. AMERICAN MOBILITY
Few features of American life are more recognizable—or more ideologically revealing—than our tradition of movement. From the colonial frontier to the suburban exodus, Americans have always been a people in motion. Migration has never been merely demographic; it has been moral and aspirational. The act of relocating—whether across counties, states, or generations—has long been celebrated as an expression of liberty and opportunity. This uniquely American habit of mobility reflects more than a taste for novelty or space. It embodies a deeply held belief that individuals have both the right and responsibility to seek out better conditions—and to begin again.
What distinguishes American mobility from mere restlessness is that it has historically produced—not fractured—civic life. Each time Americans relocated, they didn’t just move into existing institutions; they built new ones. This dynamic has made American civic life unusually resilient, precisely because it has been so often reconstituted. Mobility constantly disrupted complacency and demanded new civic energy. Newcomers brought new expectations; migrants brought new ideas. Each wave of movement gave rise to a new patch of the American tapestry—small towns, immigrant enclaves, Sun Belt cities—all constructed around the familiar logic: liberty earned, and liberty tethered, through association. That is why America, far more than its European peers, developed a civil society that depended on volunteers, not bureaucrats, to organize social life.
Yet this habit is waning. After remaining steady for much of the 20th century, annual geographic mobility in the United States has fallen to historic lows—now under 9%, the lowest rate recorded since the Census Bureau began tracking. Americans today are more likely to remain near their birthplace, even when opportunity beckons elsewhere. That decline has civic consequences. Without newcomers, many towns lose the disruption that once forced them to reinvent themselves. Institutions age in place; ambition stalls. Tocqueville warned that democracy could devolve into a kind of passive fatalism—what he called “soft despotism”—when citizens cease to act. The decline in mobility may be a warning sign that such a shift is underway.
The implications are profound. If liberty has historically been kept vital through motion, its stagnation risks ideological decay. When Americans stop moving—literally and metaphorically—they stop doing the very thing that once bound freedom to responsibility. The decline of mobility doesn’t just threaten economic dynamism; it erodes the habit of remaking civil society from the bottom up.
Contemporary Challenges and the Imperative of Ideology
From the time of John Winthrop’s Puritans, the American experiment has shown that individual freedom thrives best within a lattice of conscience and community. What has often looked like rugged individualism has always been bounded—quietly, but powerfully—by the ligaments of faith, family, voluntary association, and local obligation. This core American value—communitarian individualism—has been a constant throughout our history: from the covenants of the early colonies, to the town halls of Tocqueville’s New England, to the barn-raisings of the frontier, to the ethnic mutual-aid societies of immigrant communities, to the volunteer spirit of civil society, and even to the norms of "corporate social responsibility" in American capitalism. At each juncture, Americans have balanced rights with responsibilities, autonomy with obligation.
Our history shows that liberty in America has always been a social project. The Founders warned that without virtue, republican self-government would fail. Tocqueville identified “self-interest rightly understood” as the moral compass that directed Americans toward civic duty without relying on enforced collectivism or self-abnegation. And the evidence—both historical and empirical—has borne this out. Americans have long scored high on individualism, yes, but also on volunteerism, charitable giving, local trust, and community involvement. These weren’t contradictions; they were mutually reinforcing. Communitarian individualism helped Americans reconcile personal striving with public life—without losing either.
Communitarian individualism has always required a great deal from Americans. It demanded moral self-restraint without coercion. It assumed cultural norms would pass from generation to generation—not through laws, but through schools, families, churches, and peer communities. And it depended on the active transmission of paradox: that you are free to live as you choose, and also duty-bound to uphold the fabric of shared life. That tension was never easy. But it was precisely in sustaining that tension—between liberty and equality—that American civic life found its meaning. In recent decades, we have allowed that tension to fray. The result is not simply civic decline, but ideological disorientation.
Ideological Disorientation is the Problem
Americans are not simply disconnected; we are disoriented. We no longer remember that the real purpose of all this effort—of all this liberty, striving, and voluntary engagement—was never just to preserve institutions or norms. It was to live out an idea: that we are engaged in a shared, aspirational project. That America is not just a place, but a promise—one that calls each generation to form a more perfect union. That promise, that moral project, is what once made the PTA feel like a duty, the town hall like a birthright, and the neighborhood club like a cause.
That is why ideology matters. Not as an academic theory, but as the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we owe one another. Communitarian individualism was never just a cultural habit—it was the civic operating system for a nation built to realize the promise of a creed. To recover that synthesis is not just to restore civic life. It is to remember its purpose: that America itself is the great unfinished project—and that each of us, in freedom and with others, is meant to help complete it.
What is the American Ideology? America Ideologue is a new Substack series that examines that question and introduces a bold and timely thesis: that America is, and has always been, defined by a coherent—if often unspoken—ideology. Most nations are bound by land, blood, or tradition. But as G.K. Chesterton observed, America is “the only nation...founded on a creed.”
This series explores how that creed was not merely an aspirational abstraction, but a working ideology deliberately enacted through constitutional design, civic institutions, and cultural norms. The analytic framework I developed as part of an unfinished doctoral dissertation aborted thirty years ago provides a way to define and possibly restore the American Ideology as a true ideology.
The question at the heart of the series is both urgent and enduring: Can the ideology that once bound us together still hold?
- TABLE OF CONTENTS -
1. Welcome to American Ideologue
2. The Dying Ideology
3. The Science of Ideas: Defining Ideology
4. In Search of the American Ideology
5. A Framework for the American Ideology
6A. The First American Synthesis
To isolate the defining features of communitarian individualism I applied four criteria: 1. Pervasiveness: the trait must be widely (though not universally) distributed across the American experience, transcending region, class, or ethnicity. 2. Persistence: it must endure across historical periods, showing resilience through changing circumstances. 3. Exceptionalism: it must reflect something distinctive about the American tradition, not merely a universal human pattern. 4. Creative Tension: it must visibly embody the dialectical balancing of individual liberty and moral equality at the heart of the American Ideology.
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Truly grateful for the feedback - I've been waiting for something like the defense I never had to give on the aborted phd! Thanks for the time and thought you're putting in to help me sharpen my thinking. I recognize that many of these characteristics are heavily mythologized. Capitalism has rarely been constrained by the generosity of its greatest beneficiaries - and, yet, I think there is something in the culture that nudges the titans of industry to remember how easy reputations are gained and lost - alongside fortunes. CSR, for instance, is such a very strange invention. I witnessed its rise in my own career with befuddlement and also a sense that it was still very american. God forbid we tax capital gains, but entirely reasonable to hire armies of people to develop ways to "give back" and listen to "stakeholders." You kept me honest once before and hoping you do it again if needed. I'll admit a quixotic tendency to insist others adopt the definitions I insist upon, but in the case of ideology I hope you give me a chance to make the case it's really what we need right now - as counterintuitive as it appears right now. I think Americans have been suffering from a collective vertigo - we're completely adrift, confused and disorientied by how we arrived in this moment. We need a map. We need some real meaning and purpose. That's my diagnosis at least, thanks again!
Thanks so much for these kind words. I would love to hear more about your own work! Communitarian Individualism is among the most important features of the ideology I believe is real and needed now more than ever. Part of the problem is since Bowling Alone (which I was involved in) we thought the solution would be to reinvigorate civic life. And while that is essential, I've come to believe the reason it's so hard to reinvigorate is we've forgotten why it matters. We need to remind ourselves of its meaning and purpose - our shared ideology is the story we forgot to tell ourselves about who we are and that we are all tasked with this amazing project to make a more perfect union.