AMERICANISMS:

AN INQUIRY INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Gabriel C. Gherasim

AMERICANISMS:

AN INQUIRY INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Gabriel C. Gherasim

2020 Szeged, AMERICANA eBooks

General editors: Réka M. Cristian & Zoltán Dragon

Gabriel C. Gherasim

ISBN: 978-615-5423-65-9 (.mobi); 978-615-5423-64-2 (.epub);

978-615-5423-63-5 (PoD)

Book design: Dragon Zoltán

AMERICANA eBooks is a division of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, published by the Department of American Studies,

University of Szeged, Hungary.

http://ebooks.americanaejournal.hu

This book is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 – Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licene. For more information, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.hu

For my son, Toma.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. INTRODUCTORY NOTES ON THE METHODOLOGY AND RATIONALITY OF INQUIRING INTO POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

2. FEDERALISM

Briefing on the ideological fabric of federalism

The road to "bad federation": from the Articles of Confederation to coercive federalism

The "good alternative": anti-federalists and the idea of limited powers

The compromising genius of republican federalism

American politics and the failed experience of confederation

On the appropriateness of "good" or "better", "bad" or "worse" epithets

3. REPUBLICANISM

From originalism to revisionism

Confronting federalism in the (post)founding era

Turning democratic and nationalist in the Jacksonian era

From abolitionism to recognition and inclusion

Experiencing incapacity to confront the spoils-system and industrial monopolies

Embracing conservative precepts after the First World War

Loaded republicanism: American ideological militarism in post-war geopolitics

Is republicanism an ideology proper?

4. NATIONALISM

The tricky avatars of an ideology

The Chosen Nation: on the conceptual brands of American exceptionalism

The Expansionist Nation: Manifest Destiny in nineteenth century America

The Divided Nation: on the Janus-faced dogmas of abolitionism, assimilationism and exclusivism

The Enlightened Nation: the American System, progressivism and the administrative state

The Messianic Nation: Americanism, anti-communism, and the paradigm of self-aggrandizing nationalism

The 'post' incarnations of an ideology

5. PROGRESSIVISM

The ant and the elephant: on the progressive ideological endeavours

Harassing the enemy: the progressive assault on laissez-faire liberalism, c. 1880s

Determination and self-centeredness: the progressive holistic reformism in the 1900s

Climax and decadence: the progressive excesses, relativism and exhaustion in the 1920s

6. DEMOCRACY

The democratic breed of exceptionalism in the United States

Conceptualizing democratic exceptionalism in the United States

Endogenous democratic exceptionalism: popular, nationalist, and egalitarian democracy in the United States

Bridging the breach: the progressive caesura and transition to outward-looking democratic exceptionalism

From self-confidence to cynicism: facets of exogenous democratic exceptionalism in the United States

7. LIBERALISM

On the entanglements of American liberalism

Individualist and secular liberalism in the founding era

Abolitionist and emancipate liberalism in the Civil War era

Industrialist and capitalist liberalism in the Gilded Age

Welfare state liberalism from New Deal to Great Society

The brand new geopolitical world of neoliberalism

The post-liberal world in the new century

8. CONSERVATISM

The inconsistent tradition: elitism and loathing in the conservative land

Scorning the Left: puzzling politics and the American pre-conservative elites in the 1930s

Defecting to the Right: 'certainty politics' and the birth of neoconservatism in the 1950s

Hard-line Americanism: muscular politics and the apogee of neoconservatism in the post-Reagan era

9. CODA: POST-TRUTH POLITICS, POPULISM, ANARCHISM, AND THE DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF IDEOLOGICAL THINKING

10. BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has matured as a result of thought-provoking lectures and seminars in History of American Political Ideas and American Intellectual History at my alma mater university. Certain incipient thoughts were further precipitated by a stimulating scholarly program at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, within a series of instructive lectures and discussions with American pundits on the comprehensive topic of American Political Development. By and large, the present investigation encloses dilemmas, intuitions and cumulative efforts in attempting to understand the peculiar and sinuous paths of American political ideologies in their dynamic configuration of bona fide political culture in the United States.

It goes without saying that this work has been constantly shaped by discrete endeavors which, piece by piece, eventually structured the book as it is. Nonetheless, some chapters were previously published by scholarly periodicals, with noticeably different contents, under dissimilar research impetuses and working hypotheses. Thus, the chapter on federalism was reconstructed, to some extent, in order to mirror the present thematic concerns: the academic article Good Federation, Confederation, Bad Federation: Why the American Controversy on the Federal Union Should Be a Lesson for the European Union (Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Philologia, no. 1, 2017, pp. 43-62) was reconfigured both by eliminating the American federalist narrative's influence upon the EU's modest federalist inceptions and by adapting its content in accordance to the development pattern of thinking. Then, Novus Ordo Seclorum: Republicanism and the Republican Party in US Politics (Transylvanian Review, vol. XXII, supplement no. 3, 2013, pp. 10-23) impelled me to substantially reconsider the ideology of republicanism in the United States, first and foremost by expanding its meanings beyond sterile association with the historical evolution of the Republican Party, following the same conceptualizing model of development. The chapter on nationalism, slightly modified, is currently under the peer-review process and considered for publication in Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Europaea, under the title An Ideography of American Nationalism. The chapters on progressivism and conservatism are original ruminations, even if, to a certain extent, they synthetically incorporate results of previous studies. Hence, the chapter on progressivism put to use some valuable references extracted from the academic article Introductory Sketch to the Analytics and Pragmatics of American Progressivism (Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Europaea, no. 3, 2011, pp. 119-142) and the review of Thomas Leonard's witty criticism of the progressive era in Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era (American, British and Canadian Studies Journal, vol. 31, 2018, pp. 148-154). As well, the chapter on conservatism exploited relevant information from a contribution to a collective volume, entitled From Socialist Left to Conservative Right: Attempted Ideological Syncretism? (What is Left from the Left-Right Cleavage? A Comparative Perspective, Eds: Sergiu Mişcoiu, Valentin Naumescu, Bucharest: ISPRI, 2015, pp. 139-157) and from a study dedicated to one emblematic figure of American neoconservatism, entitled Ideological Realpolitik, Euroscepticism and American Exceptionalism in Robert Kagan (Romanian Review of Political Sciences and International Relations, vol. XIV, no. 1, 2017, pp. 66-80).

My deepest gratitude goes to Professor Réka M. Cristian, chair of the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary and founding editor of AMERICANA publications, who graciously suggested this publication and dutifully guided me to comply with the publishing process, to Zoltán Dragon, co-editor of the Szeged-based AMERICANA publications and Christopher Turley. Professor Emeritus in American Studies Marius Jucan and Michael Hannahan, Professor in the Political Science Department at University of Massachusetts and Civic Initiative Director at UMass Donahue Institute, benevolently advised this work and deserve my special consideration. I thank my old friend, Gabriel Chiorean, who cleverly designed the front cover of this book. Above all, this experiment in ideological development is dedicated to my son, Toma.

Gabriel C. Gherasim

1. INTRODUCTORY NOTES ON THE METHODOLOGY AND RATIONALITY OF INQUIRING INTO POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

To confine the exercise of ideological thinking to the inventories of political theory and/ or history of political doctrines would be equivalent to validating, once more, standard fixations, both theoretically and methodologically. The logical implication of rendering ideological thinking to political science alone is the commonsense perception that political ideologies merely serve as a kind of shortcut understanding of political affiliations, drives to action and embedded prejudices in dealing with political matters. Consequently, the association between ideological reasoning and doctrinarian/ dogmatic approaches to politics turns inescapably limited, linear and unsophisticated. Self-indoctrination replaces cognition and taken for granted thinking recipes obliterate inquiring rationalization.

It is precisely rationalization (i.e., the drive to understand) that has been challenging and which informed and animated the content and findings of this book. I have given allegiance to the concept of rationalization in Max Weber's holistic sense, albeit in a far more restrictive usage and with obvious more modest results. However far-fetched and obsolete, Max Weber's genuine intuition was that rationalization, as a world view, essentially reveals the development dynamics of transformative ideas; accordingly, rationality and rationalization aptly illuminate on logical consistency and objective possibility of transformative ideas to unveil premises, processes, tendencies, connections and development phases. Although Weber himself found it annoying to be rigidly classified either as a historian or as a sociologist, his followers concurred to assimilating his magnificent works to either sociology or history of unfolding rationality. Considering the inherent difficulty of exhaustively making sense in regard to his systematic (and unfinished) ruminations notwithstanding, Weber rejected both the speculative nature of historical idealism and the purported objectivism of historical materialism. For Weber, expressly in his Methodology of Social Sciences and other methodological works, such as The Social Psychology of World Religions and Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, among other numerous and expeditious references, rationalizing development processes would be tantamount to liberating cognition for the purpose of eliciting normative theories along with their inner necessity and explanatory power about the discovery of formal principles guiding the development of political societies and cultures. Moreover, in his erudite The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber suggested that rationality had derived from the gradual disenchantment of the world which further generated the adoption of secular theories; therefore, sui generis rationalization appears effective only by moving beyond mere empirical validity and rigid causality of history, in order to grasp historical continuities. It was not by accident that Weber conceived his groundbreaking book on the spiritual genesis of capitalism as "an essay in cultural history": his germane intention was to discover a general canon of reasoning, along with conceptual types and regularities governing the genesis, development and consequences of religious ethics on the formation of secular entrepreneurial mentality.

Following Weber's epistemology and his synthetic theory of rationality, I saved only the cognitive dimension for the purpose of my investigation; my investigation on the development of political ideologies in the United States eschews evolutionary approaches of ideological progress and/ or any style of historical rationalization. At most, my inquiry probably preserves neo-evolutionary traits, due to a certain commitment to rationalizing development based on continuity and progression of a limited number of stages associated to the objectification of American political ideological thinking. In whatever collateral way, my research also stands for a synoptic investigation in the history of political doctrines, due to chronological accumulation and growth in regard to unfolding American political ideologies and their temporal contextualization. I would not categorically dismiss the above-mentioned connotations of my research, even though my original intention was that of delving into a kind of intellectual archaeology in the soil of American ideological thinking with a view to excavate principles, guiding ideas and values that have pushed forward the development of ideological enfranchisement of politics, much in the manner in which Talcott Parsons rejected fashionable evolutionary theories in order to embrace a functionalist conversion of evolutionism, in his search for "value commitments and mechanisms of influence" (Parsons 1977, 208). I go along with Parsons' basic endeavor, without the institutionalist stance of his functionalism.

Acknowledging these theoretical and intellectual lineages, I think that the methodological 'red thread' of my investigation resides in reasoning about the American political development. The procedure per se has nothing to do with any partisan commitment whatsoever, as the title might be indicative for. 'Americanisms', with its suffix 'ism', speaks about the subject-matter of the book and the conceptual terrain on which the inquisitive operation is unraveled. More accurately, the term 'Americanism' designates a topological category (i.e., genus proximum) subsuming the most impactful varieties of ideological positioning and thinking in the United States, as its specific differences. Various readings of American political ideologies have had a cognitive impact upon me and I have been contemplating about providing this book with an intentional cognitive imprint as well. I do not feel that I have followed already forayed paths, for any intellectual scrutiny is a world in itself, with its own quest scenario and demonstrative ambitions. Thus, rationalizing ideological development precisely points to a world view - specifically of the American political ideologies panorama - and its rational ordering. Any act of rationality should be cognitive in nature and logical in its operation: the rationality of ideological thinking and its developments stands as subsidiary agenda of this book along with the author's expectation that meaningful ideological ruminations on how to inform, explain and understand the overall transformations of the American political environment will have a cognitive impact as well. Ultimately, inquiring development of political ideologies in the United States is a pertinent tool in the use of closing the apparent gap between political ideas and political realities.

Yet, my method of inquiry encloses certain specific assumptions that require further comments. First, developmental thinking and developmental studies have originated roughly in the 1970s as momentous responses to challenges of post-industrial and post-colonial world realities. As a peculiar field of investigation under the pluri-disciplinary umbrella of social sciences, the developmental approaches postulated critical insights, called for improving reforms and claimed ethical responsibility in dealing with the most pressing problems of the contemporary world, such as eradication of poverty, famine and diseases, reduction of inequalities, and readjustment of opportunity conditions for underdeveloped regions and countries of the 'third world'. My inquiry about development is at odds with the most typical concerns of developmental studies, substantially resulting from a distinct conceptualization of the very idea of development. Principled mistrust in regard to my type of development investigation might be conducive to reproaches of 'Americentrism'. While standard developmental thinking is critical, deconstructionist and humanistic, my peculiar inquiry purports at objectifying the development of ideological thinking in the United States and elucidating on the cognitive impact of political ideas upon the overall transformation of American political culture. Thus, my approach differs both in its object of investigation and the theoretical and methodological working hypotheses of research.

Inquiring development is not possible in the absence of revealing transformative ideas, evolving beliefs and paradigmatic phases of progression. In contrast to the dialectic method, the unfolding of progression along with inherent changes, although implying a 'master narrative', lacks the teleological end. In other words, it is neither normative, nor prescriptive, fundamentally for the reason of dismissing the necessary direction of ideas towards accomplishing an ultimate rational end. The concept of necessity is mostly visible within historical narratives validated by causal explanation. I do not think that causal connections between ideas and facts could be consistently maintained, for the concept of causality as such could not be deemed as necessary; on the other hand, the logical structure of any narrative is not secured through strict causal inferences, so that logical determinism should be dismissed as incomplete and reductionist. In context, at variance with one recent research (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, 149-172), I am reluctant to admit the validity of strict causal correlations between democratic values, on the one hand, and democratic institutions and behaviors, on the other. Otherwise, one has to accept both utter normativism of values and integral (historical) determinism from norms and values to institutions and behaviors. Still, any conceptualization of development should illustrate contrasts, shortcomings and deficits as well. Thus, development studies are expected to put forward all component phases in sequence to their past rationale, together with rationalization of their progression or deterioration.

Development cogitation is not necessary, but rather plausible, under the persuasive force of logical arguments; neither is it continuous in its integrality, but - in order to attain comprehensiveness - it should enclose explanatory discontinuities as premises for further improvements. Yet, unmistakably, it should be cumulative, both in the sense of development as temporal progression and in the sense of its internal consistency. For instance, a comprehensive inquiry on liberalism should illustrate both its ideological growth as a process and its accumulated complexity along the way of its development.

My inquiry into the development of American political ideologies primarily stresses upon the power of political ideas to induce prospective reforms and inspire shared values; hence, it is mostly oriented towards deciphering political mentalities, informing collective consciousness and stimulating dynamic changes. As an experiment in intellectual history, it surpasses any concerns in regard to the field of empirical history. The study of political ideas and mentalities is historically inconclusive, since the formation and dissemination of ideas are rather diffuse phenomena. And since I was not preoccupied to write a historical work properly, any reference to historical events, facts, institutions, behaviors and legislation is rather illustrative and circumstantial, with no heuristic value whatsoever.

Any relevant inquiry on development should be exclusively retrospective. Likewise the teleological focus which obliterates cumulative thinking about development for the sake of holistic outlook and intellectual idealism, any approach in the service of future anticipations and/ or factual predictions result in sheer prophesy. I did my best to avoid a doctrinarian account of ideological development in the United States and to eliminate any predictive commendation in regard to future prospects of political ideologies; in brief, any lucid thinking on development should be about edifying the past, not framing the future.

The present approach on development acknowledges for evolutionary narration and is only remotely concerned with comparative analysis. At best, for the sake of accuracy and completeness, alternative strains of development permeate the narrative in order to point out competing views and their contrasts, on the one hand, and their potential for change and relative value, on the other. Standard comparative studies regularly immerse into functionalist accounts of practices and institutions and establish relevant and stable criteria for the purpose of comparison (Hadenius 2015, 195-205). To the contrary, bypassing static analysis, my inquiry on development is an examination of ideas in motion or in regard to their transformative capacity as guiding ideas.

Logically connected to the previous remarks, thinking on development is essentially dynamic; one of the most basic working hypotheses of this book is that the intractable historical flux should be subordinated to moving ideas, and that is the reason why both synchronicity of facts and events and their evolutionary scrutiny are conspicuously absent as a guiding methodological conduct. If there is an intrinsic conditionality between historical facts and ideas, then the presupposition of this work has been that political ideologies have energized politics, not vice versa, even if I would not deny that political contexts could stand as productive ferments of ideas. However, my primordial concern was to study the generative and driving force of ideologies in the realm of American politics, although my intentional drive was not genealogical, but developmental. In this book, historical realities have a narrow explanatory function, constituting the illustrative framework in which political ideas are dynamically located.

It is worth mentioning that my inquiry into the development of political ideologies in the United States could not be clarifying without highlighting the ineluctable syncretism of ideological thinking. Nonetheless, the concoction and convolution of political ideas are not auspicious for a holistic approach, but rather instrumental for understanding the intricacies of political circumstances. More specific, in the case of the United States, ideological syncretism should be explored from the standpoint of intersections, encounters, concatenations and overlapping political ideas. This strategy of inquiry is characteristically helpful for understanding the very developing character of political ideologies. For the purpose of exemplification, one could not get the whole picture of American nationalism in the absence of acknowledging how the original federalist and republican ideas intermingled and appropriated each other's contents in order to generate the premises for a genuine national ethos; moreover, the exceptionalist mindset cut across both ideologies and intensified their edifying zeal at the heart of American nationalism. Furthermore, concurrent intellectual movements inoculated basic political ideals with their strong beliefs, refining in this way the ideological fulcrum for one or another cause of development. Significant cases in point are the transcendentalist movement which decisively impacted upon the ideology of abolitionism and/ or the philosophy of pragmatism which stood at the core of the progressive mindset. But, probably more than most, ideological syncretism functions as the very elucidatory tool in explaining the baffling ideological transition of former utopian leftists to neo-conservatism during the interwar period and beyond.

All things considered, the approach of American political ideologies development aims at rationalizing the interplay of conceptions, views and beliefs that have shaped thinking about politics within the course of US history. At the confluence of intellectual political history and archaeology of ideological thought, this book calls upon capacities of rational cognition and simply claims that broad-spectrum rationality of development routine could elucidate on the transformative role of ideological endeavors in the field of American politics. It generalizes more than hypostatizes, directs towards rather than analyzing and specifying, and delineates stages of development more visibly than itemizing facts and events following a chronological pattern of explanation.

I am fully aware of probable objections of postmodernists, empiricists, post-structuralists and their compeers in regard to theoretical and methodological bearings of this book. In keeping with their specific prerequisites, I anticipate that functionalists, institutionalists, behaviorists and the like would formulate their partisan criticism. In my defense, even if some of their objections might be solid, I would say that I could not possibly please them all. To the postmodern gripe, which might doubt both the effectiveness of rationality of development following a fundamentally modern mannerism of thought and the inherent assumption that development implies, after all, embedded optimism about linear progress in history, I would answer that this book is neither a piece in modernization theory, nor an account of historical progress, but an inquisitive adventure in the realm of the transformative power of political ideologies. They might be at odds with both the style of thought and the generalizing manner of conducting the research, but I do not see why deconstruction, for once, would better objectify both the hypotheses and the results of an investigation; after all, as I have mentioned, this book mirrors a subjective view of a small world targeting inter-subjective consideration. Empiricists - moderate and radical - would find it difficult to validate my contentions in absence of sufficient references to factual data extracted from the American political experience; I would say that, by testing my arguments and presuppositions, they could bring valuable insights for further research. For post-structuralists, one important counterargument from a substantial list of possible objections would be that this work is just another probe of legitimizing a specific (and specious) discourse in the benefit of American exceptionalism and imperialism, although, mind them, a study on the 'power of ideas' does not unmistakably encapsulate a hidden power discourse or agenda, other than the self-professed experiment in rational cognition.

Any work should be evaluated in terms of its accomplishments and failures within its self-assumed area of investigation, and not for what remains outside its scope. Of course, I wouldn't venture to pretend complete saturation of the subject matter, so that any pertinent criticism might bring constructive and additional gains to this study. Thus, it was not my purpose to test my inquiry into the development of political ideologies within the overall system of competing mentalities and cognitive structures that compose the American ideological framework. However, functionalists might find themselves not completely dissatisfied with some of my circumstantial references in regard to the role of political ideas in stimulating shared beliefs and precipitating certain processes and institutional mechanisms. For different reasons, behaviorists might claim that I did not do enough - not by far - to externalize the content of political ideas in the field of action; moreover, according to logical behaviorism, I completely failed to clarify how developing political mentalities had caused specific dispositions of political behavior and why one political ideology or another had induced a certain behavioral mechanism to the detriment of other possible (alternative) responses. Eventually, institutionalists might dismiss my research on the development of American political ideologies as futile, since there is no compelling argument that the developing character of political ideas has paralleled the advancement of political institutions in the United States of America.

2. FEDERALISM

Briefing on the ideological fabric of federalism

Framing federalism as a political ideology is controversial or, at any rate, could raise a few eyebrows. And yet, the widespread shell of the federalist idea generated various federal political configurations made up of federal governments, institutions and practices. In 1996, one could count ten large federal nations, encompassing about half of the planet’s inhabitable land and almost 40 per cent of its population (Lowi 2006, 95). These rough numerical data show that, throughout modernity, the concept of federal state/ nation has acquired a deep political meaning that enabled the emergence of federal political systems. Nevertheless, the flaws of federalism are far from being completely solved, even though, both normatively and prescriptively, there are strong ideological assumptions in favour of accepting the federal design. The normative framework of federalism was formulated in early modernity by Johannes Althusius, who published Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata in 1614, while the prescriptive foundations of federalism were established at the end of the eighteenth century within the dispute between federalists and anti-federalists on the issue of the United States Constitution's ratification. According to many scholars and political scientists, federalism was probably the greatest achievement of the American original political culture, which should be validated in terms of "the art of government" (Lipson 1964, 143).

However, the following dilemma should be lucidly confronted: are historical federal experiences explanatory for both the accomplishments and shortcomings of the federalist ideology? If the answer is yes, what we are looking for is an in-depth investigation of ideological federalism. This is the reason why I formulate a distinction between "good" and "bad" federalism without being a priori and righteously committed to one form of federalism to the detriment of the other. On the other hand, confederations, although distinct political systems from federations, can be assessed in turn as being "good" or "bad", as the case may be. I would rather consider "good" and "bad" as metonymic references consistent with the effectiveness of the federalist ideology in relation to historically incorporated practices and institutions. Consequently, my approach aims at identifying nuances, both positive and negative, within the colouring of various federalist conceptions. My analysis reveals an approach to federalism development that attempts to unmask and criticise what I have termed "bad federalism" and to call for melioristic solutions within the framework of the United States’ historical experiences of federalism.

Out of the four possible attitudes that can lead to the emergence of a federal political system in general, two of them are illustrative for what a "good federation" should look like; these attitudes are consensualism and cooperation. The other two are explanatory for what "bad federation" means; these attitudes are hostile and anarchic. Even if, etymologically, the meaning of federalism should logically exclude bad institutions and practices (i.e., the Latin word foedus means "voluntary association among equals") (Gerston 2007, 5), there are both outright and collateral political practices that can damage sound functionalism of federalism. But, if we are to preserve federalism according to the original etymology of the notion, there are at least two positive implications of federalism: contractualism and equal participation of constituent members. Many scholars have argued that federal regimes worldwide have favoured the expansion of political participation, while the issue of contractualism is still problematic.

In the aftermath of World War II, federalism was envisaged as the proper solution to managing the diversity of societies, cultures and regional economic interests worldwide. Prior to 1945, federalism had been highly criticised as a form of weak government, unable to cope with future major challenges (Laski 1939, 367-369). The European Union first grew out of one-dimensional institutions (such as the European Coal and Steel Community and Euratom), but has progressively adopted federal mechanisms and strategies in the processes required by decision-making policies. By that time, the United States had already tested the federal system for almost two centuries. Certain major differences still characterize the federal arrangements of the United States and the European Union, respectively. The main difference between them is formal: while the United States is a nation-state, working within the legal framework of a federal constitution, the European Union is a voluntary alliance of states governed by treaties, and this is probably the fundamental flaw of European federalism. However, according to critics, both of them exert power according to the functional principle of "dispersal of power" (Sbragia 2006, 15-16).

Before proceeding to analyzing the development of the American experience of federalism, I add two brief observations which reveal the complexity of the problem. Firstly, there is no undivided agreement upon the normative definition of federalism; still, according to many scholars, there are three basic characteristics of federalism to be incorporated into a sweeping definition, namely guaranteed separation of powers, decentralisation and coordination. Secondly, there are also different designs of federal institutions consistent with two main types of federalisms: executive federalism (e.g., Germany or Austria), in which the federal government provides incentives to local institutions for cooperation and coordination of policies, and dual federalism (e.g., Canada, the United States), in which powers are distributed and divided (Wachendorfer-Schmidt 2000, 5-7).

The road to "bad federation": from the Articles of Confederation to coercive federalism

One holistic historical perspective established that the development of American federalism could be divided into three main stages: the dual federalism of the Founding Fathers, the cooperative federalism originating in the 1930s, and the coercive federalism of the 1960s (Kincaid 2008, 63-81). The dual model, resulting from the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, postulated federalism as a permanent and dynamic tension between the constituent states and the federal union. According to the cooperative design of federalism, the relation between the federal government and the states was conceived in terms of mutual exchanges, while the model of coercive federalism put the states in strict terms of submission. The development towards restraining states' powers is essentially what I term "the path towards bad federation": this assessment considers the fact that there has been a progressive and constant evolution - with minor exceptions - towards centralisation, especially through the federal use of some tricks, such as the congressional pre-emption provision and federal tax credits (Zimmerman 2008, 187-188). This rough characterisation may seem a crude over-simplification, but my point is that this model of development has been descriptive for what "bad federalism" stands for.

Despite lacking in specific troublesome features characteristic to multinational federalism in Europe, the United States have constantly experienced historical challenges associated to territorial federalism (Kymlicka 1998, 127). First and foremost, the strategies of coercive territorial federalism in the United States originated in the 1930s welfare policies of the New Deal agenda and increased in accumulating pessimistic views about the growing tendencies of federal centralisation. Metaphorically, the "territorial conquest" of state power in the United States has been congruent with federal political decisionism associated to policies of redistribution, common defence, and macroeconomic control. Pervasive federal economic paternalism turned to be effective through regulatory analysis in technical terms, for the purpose of coherent implementation of decisions. Some scholars go so far as to consider regulatory analysis and decision-making efficiency as new forms of rationality in politics (McGarity 1991, 304). However, territorial federalism has managed to survive in spite of this functionalist controversy, whilst some instances of multinational federalism in Europe, such as the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic, or the former Republic of Yugoslavia, turned into "defunct federalisms" (Kavalski and Zolkos 2008, 1).

Beyond the linear analysis model of the historical evolution of American federalism, the functioning of federal institutions in the United States can also be characterized in terms of ups and downs, alternating "bad practices" with "good practices". Thorough analysis applied to major decisions of the Supreme Court in regard to the federal issue reveals such variations: i) between 1803 and 1835, the Supreme Court tended to favour federal government provisions to the detriment of states and individuals; ii) between 1836 and 1937, due to president Andrew Jackson’s opportunity to nominate seven new members to the Supreme Court, the decisions of this institution leaned towards the prerogatives of the states to the detriment of federal government policies; iii) in the period 1937-1986, federal centralisation policies inspired by the New Deal mood received preeminent support of the Supreme Court; iv) after 1986, the Supreme Court's decisions have been predominantly favourable to state rights in matters concerning commerce, civil rights or environment (Gerston 2007, 53-61).

The original federal project in the United States began on a promising note: the Founding Fathers, driven by diverse interests and reasons, started to think about the opportunity of designing consistent federal arrangements in order to replace the ineffective Articles of Confederation, which, during the decade 1777-1787, had failed to generate uniform responses and to coordinate public policies beyond the local and state levels. Scholars who explain the birth of federalism in the United States (in political terms) argue that there were two main practical reasons behind the need to discuss the project of federal government during the second Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia from 1787: the refusal of the confederate states to pay a federal tax necessary for the smooth functioning of the Union and the existence of harsh competition among states because of the introduction of protective tariffs (Rakove 1997, 26-30). Other theorists insist that prevalent economic interests influenced the process of constitutional ratification: western landowners, merchants and delegates who owned private or public securities defended the idea of a constitutional federation, while slave-owners and debtors opposed it for obvious reasons (McGuire and Ohsfeldt 1989, 175-204). A compromise had to be achieved between federalists and anti-federalists on two main issues: the principle of representation and the distribution of power rule (Gerston 2007, 27-30). During the debates among the delegates, it became clear that the only compromising solution was federalism as voluntary association based on the consensual principle of representative government and the functional principle of the extended republic (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 2008, 48-55). In other words, two designs competed for the future format of federalism in the United States: one view insisted on a form of centralised federalism (Riker 1964), and the other amended this radical view by conceiving the union as a republic with a "federal center" (Filippov, Ordeshook and Shvetsova 2004, 113). The defenders of strong centralised government responded to the anti-federalist opposition with their resilience to consider any compromise necessary to the ratification of the federal constitution. Federalist 39 clearly stated that the new constitutional arrangements should be formally republican rather than federal, based on the idea that the constitutional provisions should address individual matters rather than states’ businesses (Peacock 2010, 70).

The charisma and prestige of Hamilton and Jefferson dominated the constitutional debates. Generally, the Federalist Papers received worse criticism than they deserved, but the truth is that the series of eighty-five essays designed for the foundation of the new federal union were rather persuasive strategies to enforce what in those times seemed a stringent necessity. I do not think that the Founding Fathers thought about centralising government power by any means. Hamilton himself did not seem fully aware of the fact that the federal design would generate discord between the central government and local governments. Instead, Hamilton contemplated on the federal idea in consensualist terms: the federal project should be a rational contract mirroring the trust of citizens in the future of a federal republic (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 2008, 113-117). First and foremost, what Hamilton had in mind was the settlement of fiscal issues: writing on the principle of divided sovereignty, he postulated the centralisation strategy resulting from his awareness of the perils and inefficiencies of the states' administration of fiscal issues (Rodden 2006, 269-270). But there is no compelling evidence that Hamilton's perspective on forging the federal union was as radical as Edmund Randolph’s resolution aiming at the de facto elimination of states’ rights during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 (Zimmerman 2008, 18). It is probably more accurate to grasp Hamilton and the federalists’ concept of the American federation as deriving from Leibniz’s classic distinction between state sovereignty and central supremacy. Specifically, Federalist 27 described the design of new political arrangements on the basis of a principled distinction between the supremacy of the federal law and the sovereign exercise of public power at the level of the member states (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 2008, 131-134). Of course, the principle of federal supremacy was the Achilles heel of American federalism because of the harsh criticism it had to confront in the course of American history. A consistent literature in the political theory of the twentieth century has challenged the idea of federal supremacy as unsustainable from the standpoint of redistributive justice.

Here and there, the federalists had to use weak arguments because of time constraints. In result, precisely because of constitutional laconism and incompleteness, the federal union had to be maintained through ad-hoc compromises several times in the course of US history. The practice of admitting new states to the union in pairs (one slave and one free) during the first half of the nineteenth century was a case in point; this bad practice had the obvious consequence of generating imbalances and ruptures between states. According to some scholars, until the Civil War, the basic shortcomings of American federalism were the principle of federal supremacy, the doctrine of nullification in the states and the constitutional right to secede (Filippov, Ordeshook and Shvetsova 2004, 55).

Considering both the advantages and the disadvantages of federal arrangements, the narrow option for assessing the federalists' agenda as "bad" federative thinking is oversimplifying the case for two reasons. Firstly, if the pillar of the federal plan was constitutionalism, and if the constitutional debate was consistent with public choices, then the labelling of "bad federalism" is rather distorted. Secondly, if we are to accept the possibility of "bad federalism", then we have to expand the meanings and implications of the centralisation of power in the federal government beyond the original undertaking of the Founding Fathers.

The "good alternative": anti-federalists and the idea of limited powers

The theoretical roots of the anti-federalist thought can be found in Locke’s political philosophy, commented and annotated by Thomas Jefferson. Essentially, John Locke grounded the idea of states’ pre-eminence over federal union on the ideas of natural rights and private property. Following Locke’s basic assumption that political liberty was dependent upon economic liberty, Thomas Jefferson derived his conception about political liberty from the political economy of the famous British philosopher (Cunningham Jr. 1987; Boorstin 1948). Locke's ruminations decisively excited the early aspirations of anti-federalists and later constituted the framework of economic and political liberalism in the United States that left the federalist concept of centralised power outside its mainstream theoretical construction. The anti-federalists were at first reluctant to accept the guiding principles of government proposed by federalists. Before and during the second Constitutional Convention, they were rather confused about the optimal solutions for the independent states. They feared further conflicts and dissensions among states resulting from competing commercial interests, which is why the anti-federalist delegates in Philadelphia envisaged a working solution in the form of mixed government shared by one national government and state governments, a solution they called the "new federalism" (Storing 1981, 32-33).

From the very beginning, they thought that the idea of limited powers was the pre-requisite for any acceptable central government. In their view, the Articles of Confederation, which they continued to defend, were the very expression of such mixed form of government and not simply a league of isolated states, as federalists contended. Additionally, they were suspicious that there was a hidden agenda of the federalists to impose centralisation as the proper governmental conduct in politics; they were also aware of the fact that Benjamin Franklin’s previously proposed Albany Plan of 1754 was substantially rejected because the colonies anticipated the peril of centralisation of power at that time (Gerston 2007, 20). Their suspicious attitude endured even after the constitutional compromise of 1787 was achieved: in the period between October 1787 and April 1788, they published a series of replies to the Federalist Papers in the New York Journal, pressing for the adoption of some amendments to the fundamental constitutional text, known as the Bill of Rights (Zimmerman 2008, 25). For most anti-federalists, such as Patrick Henry and Melanchton Smith, the defence of individual liberties and rights as truly republican virtues came first, while the federal union was a secondary compromising necessity in the service of common defence against external enemies (Storing 1981, 24). Moreover, they insisted that the guiding principle of the new federal state should be mutual respect among its constituents. Mutual dependence of the states on the federal government was a rather unavoidable and collateral effect, and that was the reason why the anti-federalists were very cautious about granting power to a federal government. Prudence was the cornerstone of their behaviour during and after the constitutional convention.

By and large, the two principles which the anti-federalists strongly advocated were accountability to the people and limited powers. These two basic criteria directed the functioning of federalism in the United States, first by using the federal constitutional provisions in the states for the elimination of local abuses, and second by "openness, transparency, and accountability in policy-making and implementation" (Kelemen 2004, 222). Commentators of federal constitutionalism in America observed that the dispute between federalists and anti-federalists on the ratification of the Constitution paved the way for the ideological controversies between liberals and egalitarians (Gerston 2007, 31), but it is rather doubtful whether the original controversy rested on theoretical and ideological considerations. The Founding Fathers aimed at constructing the new constitutional arrangements for practical reasons: this is why the constitutional text still remains a general mechanism for containing political power and establishing limitations against the authority of the federal government. However, the original text of the Constitution hinted at the desideratum of crafting a national government and stipulated little about state powers.

Individual rights and the rights of the states were to be dealt with in some amendments to the Constitution. In the series of the first ten amendments of the original Bill of Rights, the last is probably the most relevant in context, due to its requirement that any prerogative not explicitly granted to the federal government should be ascribed to the states or the citizens. Arguably, this was the most frequently used objection to federalism during the course of American history. Not only did the anti-federalists fear the granting of too much power to the federal government, but more significantly, they had additional apprehensions about the negative effects of the representation principle. The anti-federalists inferred that one logical consequence of the principle of separation of powers should be the non-delegation principle (Majone 2006, 131-134). Beyond establishing criteria for the separation of powers and checks and balances principles, the anti-federalists took a firm stand in order to combat the centralisation of power by thinking about appropriate election mechanisms of the electors and decentralising the organisation of political parties down to the local levels (Filippov, Ordeshook and Shvetsova 2004, 233-236).

Asking what is to be learned from the American experience of federalism, Theodore Lowi argued that the driving principle of American federalism was "dual citizenship". Beyond the circumstantial understanding of this concept, its interpretations vary. For instance, dualism can be properly understood by considering the two-fold meaning of the notion of regulation: based on the assumption that, in French, the term is related to both régle (i.e., rule) and réglémentation (i.e., the practice of imposing rules), consequently, federalism should be understood in two ways, as referring to both the "patronage state" and the "regulatory state", respectively (Lowi 2006, 94-98). Undoubtedly, the anti-federalists would have been offended by any of the above-mentioned configurations of the federal state. In fact, contemporary federalism is largely consistent with the anti-federalist perspective on the attributions, powers and institutions of a sui generis federation: independence and territorial politics are functional approaches of federalism in the anti-federalist sense (Dosenrode 2007, 7). If we were to speak today about good practices of federalism, this should be consistent with postulating the perpetuation of the anti-federalist impetuses in regard to criticizing centralisation, dismantling of monolithic powers and calibrating the asymmetries between the federal behemoth and constituent states.

The compromising genius of republican federalism

If Hamilton was the most vocal supporter of centralised federal government and Jefferson was the mentor of the anti-federalist aegis of state and individual liberties, then James Madison epitomized the compromising genius who understood that a final solution was not possible without giving satisfaction to both sides. For Madison, political behaviour was an applied science of political design: his views on the institutions of federal government were not deductive and theoretical, but rather empirical and circumstantial (Cain and Jones 1989, 11-30). If one can identify the theoretical foundations of moderate federalism in Madison, then its sources could be found in Montesquieu. The French modern philosopher conceived federalism as the embodiment of central authority, necessary for the preservation of collective security and the eradication of corruption; be that as it may, the balancing counterforce for central authority should be the independence of the judiciary and its bulwark of individual rights (Richter 1977). So, both the modern theory and the American design of federal government had the form of a necessary compromise for the peaceful existence of citizens. The American constitutionalism did not result from dogmatic commitments to rigid values, but - according to some recent interpretations - out of the management of strategies within the political procedure of ratification. For instance, game theory approaches of federalism argued that despite the greater number of anti-federalists, the federalists won the battle for the ratification of the constitution due to the strategies they used in order to achieve a compromise. Game theorists reject the simplistic approach according to which there was a polarisation of views between the two sides and argue that there were five possible compromising strategies between the extremist unconditional ratification and rejection (Fink and Riker 1989, 227-228).

Accordingly, the compromising genius should be understood in terms of certain middle ground strategies on two practical issues dividing federalists from anti-federalists. The delegates at the Philadelphia convention did not necessarily share one agenda or another; rather, they were interested in solving pressing outcomes if the Constitution would have been adopted. One pressing issue was political (i.e., the conflict between big states and small states) and the other economic (i.e., the issue of slavery). Two opposing plans resulted from controversies among the delegates, namely the federalist Virginia Plan and the anti-federalist New Jersey Plan. Politically, anti-federalists feared that the distribution of powers within the federal states would be an asset for the big states, which were represented in Congress in greater numbers. Economically, the anti-federalists aimed to exempt slaves from taxation, but counted them for representation purposes. On the other hand, federalists insisted on a strong national government politically and for the taxation of slaves economically. The Connecticut Compromise finally found a middle way out, under the guiding principles of separation of powers and checks and balances.

Both compromises suggested by Madison conveyed the contractualist view on federalism. Various theorists appreciate differently the influence of the compromises on federal institutions: Richard Hofstadter noted that the key concept of the federalist design in the United States was the principle of checks and balances (Hofstadter 1948, 7-10), while Robert Nagel observed that the very possibility of achieving the compromise was the enforcement of the separation of powers principle (Nagel 2001, 16). In effect, the principle of checks and balances expressed the founders’ desire to control the central government and to impose the accountability of politicians to the people, while separation of powers was about establishing limitations to federal government’s powers.

The final result of the Madisonian compromise appeared as a kind of mixed government formula starting from the rational premise that for any mechanism of power, an obverse instrument should have been employed in order to restore the equilibrium of political forces. For instance, when the Founding Fathers conceived the American political system in its present-day configuration, they thought of complementing the executive appointment mechanism with selection procedures in regard to representatives, fearing a possible tyranny of the masses. All components of the American political system illustrate the concern of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention to build the new federal republic according to the blueprint of divided sovereignty, as, for instance, Federalist 32 and 62 prescribed. What resulted from the original design of federalism in the United States incorporated the basic principles of a modern federation: statehood, self-determination of entities, sovereignty of member states, governmental system, division of powers, distribution of resources, legitimacy and participation (Dosenrode 2007, 19-24).

American politics and the failed experience of confederation

Paradoxically enough, the confederate design failed twice in American history. First, during the decade 1777-1787, under the Articles of Confederation, American colonies attempted to become more powerful; because of both the international context and the controversies among the states, the Articles of Confederation eventually came to nothing. The second time, during the Civil War (1861-1865), eleven Southern slave states seceded from the federal union and formed the Confederate States of America; this last experience of American confederation could not endure, mainly because the states of the new confederation opposed the overall progress of the United States. In both cases, the American confederations were not formally recognised, in the first case because the state-colonies were not independent, and in the second because the confederation emerged as a belligerent state of affairs. In fact, the colonial affinity towards the confederate pattern of political establishment goes back to mid-seventeenth century: the first improvised confederation was New England, which resulted as a confederacy of four colonies, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut and New Haven. The purpose of building a confederate alliance, as early as 1643, was common defence against the natives (Zimmerman 2008, 14).

Leaving aside the rather underdeveloped and ad-hoc confederate impulse in New England, it is significant to scrutinize the pre-constitutional American confederation under the Articles of Confederation. The principle that guided the contrivance of the Articles in 1777 was governmental autonomy of the states: the small North-eastern colonies expected that the voluntary association of states under the provisions of the Articles of Confederation should save their sovereignty in the face of both the British domination and the virtual oppression of a substitute centralised government. This form of political organisation was characterised as a "loose federal union" (Lipset 1963, 30). In the decade that preceded the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, federal arrangements were practically non-existent because there were no confederate executive, no judiciary, and no power to raise standing armies or to sign treaties, since the procedure of unanimity was required for any decisions. Under the circumstances, the role of the national state was void in the Articles of Confederation (Gerston 2007, 24-25).

The confederate vibration did not completely vanish after the creation of the federal state: close readings of eminent American nationalists in the first half of the nineteenth century (especially John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams) illuminate on certain remains of the old confederate mindset that were associated, at that time, with the progressive democratisation of public life in the states and the isolationist propaganda of Southern democratic nationalists. Unfortunately, the legacy of what I would call the 'proto-confederate' thought in the United States took not only the path of isolationism and political irrelevance of the states, but also the form of divisive spirit that culminated with secessionism of the Civil War period. Moreover, in the twentieth century, the confederate conception on politics preserved the secessionist spirit, leading to a new direction that shaped the neo-confederate critique of American federalism. The neo-confederate ideology was monopolized by Southern white culture as fundamentally anti-immigration, homophobic and anti-democratic (Hague, Sebesta and Beirich 2008, 1-19). The manifesto of the new confederate blueprint, published by Washington Post in 1995, called for an independent confederacy of Southern states in which states’ rights, local control, removal of federation funding and preservation of the Christian tradition stood as the guiding rules of the new political psyche (Hill and Fleming 1995). Of course, it would be fallacious to blame the Articles of Confederation for future misappropriations, distortions and political atavism. On the other hand, considering the unfortunate legacy of the confederate idea in the United States, one could deem the original confederate provisions as both inappropriate and inconsistent with the present-day conception on the matter. If this is the case, a confederation in terms of innovative contemporary provisions would be a bad alternative to federalism.

I do not imply that, mutatis mutandis, the confederate scheme cannot be a viable alternative to certain shortcomings of federalism. Vertically understood, federalism could be more damaging: the vertical assumptions of the federalist mindset derive from the purported existence of an implicit top-down hierarchy considering first the nation-state, then the constituent states and local powers at the bottom. The vertical organisation of the federal state can generate premises for political disjunction, because of divergent views of the component units on one and the same issue; this state of things would eventually evolve into confederate practices and institutions. The most common distinction between federations and confederations resides in different formal arrangements: while confederations are either defined as associations of independent states designed to last for a long time, and in which power is exercised by state units, or as associations of states in which the general government is subordinated to regional governments (Wheare 1980), federations are formally more substantial since they are maintained through constitutional arrangements (instead of treaties based on voluntary association). The functioning of federalism in the United States throughout history made the confederate ideas as rather contingent solutions to overcome inherent inconsistencies. For instance, the practice of dissociating the two foci of power created the premises for the ideological split of the federal union between the liberalism of federal government policies and the concentration of conservative tendencies in the states. The confederate idea did not completely lose credibility, but did not manage to surpass the pitfalls of mixed government conception. Furthermore, compelling criticism of the confederate understanding of the representation principle looks solid: it argues that confederations are prone to favour interests of the component units to the detriment of fair representation of individual rights and liberties in the states (Majone 2006, 121).

On the appropriateness of "good" or "better", "bad" or "worse" epithets

Looking for a "good" construal of the federalist theory would be tantamount to acknowledge the validity of a normative concept of federalism. Accordingly, would this approach be of any use whatsoever? And, if the answer is yes, could this normative theory be the most appropriate instrument of analysis for political practices and institutions commonly associated with federalism? Of course, if affirmative answers to both these questions were plausible, the controversies on federalism would be rather minor and passable. But I think that such approaches to the topic of federalism are simply improbable. If this is the case, then we should proceed conversely: starting from acknowledging the impracticality of federalism as a normative theory, there is the possibility of finding out criteria that can contribute to melioristic approaches to federalism in practice. It follows that the most valuable focus should be directed towards the "betterment" of federalism in keeping with institutionalist and pragmatic views, instead of searching for the "good" (i.e., steady, infallible and truth-oriented) tailoring of the federalist normative theory. Moreover, this type of conceptualization is consistent with the comprehension of federalism development as a regular and procedural set of practices.

Three basic controversial issues are interfering with the development thesis of ideological federalism: centralisation and decisionism, historical devolution, and future challenges. Centralisation and decisionism are marks of authoritarianism, devolution reveals incongruence, and unresponsiveness to future challenges is the mark of inadequateness. The crisis of federalism - if there is such a crisis - might also be understood as the result of relativism of representations and interpretations associated with its occurrences and effectiveness.

Centralisation and decisionism are political practices emerging from dogmatic views in regard to the pre-eminence of federal government in all public areas. Most critics of federalism counterbalanced decisionism and centralisation of power by calling for extended political participation, decentralisation and regionalism. The option for decentralisation is justifiable on grounds of irrational taxation, major differences among political cultures and ethnic societies, and/ or the inopportunity of excluding constituent members from the decision-making processes, at least in emergency situations. If the distinction between vertical and horizontal federalism can be rendered relevant, then decisionism and centralization are landmarks of the vertical model. The lesson of the American founding experience of federalism should be taught as how anti-federalists attempted - and substantially succeeded - to impose their perspective of horizontal federalism. Current criticism of federalism in the United States has taken a mainly anti-federalist stand by asking for constitutional powers on behalf of the states or by denouncing some essential omissions of the original text of the Constitution (e.g., public-private partnerships and constitutional provisions about connections between private businesses and the federal government). Of course, these deficiencies indirectly stand for new amendments to the Constitution. Moreover, the critique of vertical federalism (i.e., centralist and decisionist) is ubiquitous: systematic analyses on the structure of governments and policy-making mechanisms reveal a basic distinction between the cooperative-type of federalism in Europe and the dual-type of federalism in North America (US and Canada), explaining the differences as dependent on specificities of political cultures and size of the federations.

The process of devolution has been depicted as the gradual development in the direction of revisiting the political practices of the federal state (Conlan 1998), with the side effect of upholding degenerative policies at the federal level to the point of comprehensive centralisation and authoritarian paternalism. So, devolution is the critical phase of what I termed "bad federation", or consistent with processes of development from "bad" to "worse". Considering the overall historical frictions between the federal government and the states in the US, the (d)evolutionary explanation of American federalism from the dualist design (after the ratification of the Constitution), through cooperative federalism (between the end of the nineteenth century to early 1930s), to centralised federalism (from the New Deal policies of the 1930s onwards) mirrors the worsening of ideological federalism and its practices.

Finally, the reconstruction of federalist tenets should follow temporal inadequacies to expected future challenges: resource management, technological innovations and globalisation are sound examples in this respect (Gerston 2007, 164-168). The neo-institutionalist trend in the reconstruction of federalism is considered a narrow-sided perspective because of its fixation on constitutional and institutional arguments and unresponsiveness to future changes. Neo- institutionalism advanced some measuring criteria of the outcomes generated by federal institutions, as follows: efficiency and transaction costs, stability (i.e., a state of equilibrium), coordination (i.e., mutual connections between institutions and individuals), distribution of power (i.e., the impact of institutional arrangements upon the levels of power enforcement), and representation (Grofman 1989, 1-4).

There are no such things as the "infallible good", "good" as an embedded quality, or "good" as an objective assessment of something. Consequently, if we are to take the Federalist Papers and the founding model of American federalism as moderate attempts to assume only the "federal centre" (and not the federal centralisation as the basic tool for avoiding incongruence and state conflicts), it is plausible for the federalist project to develop into a "good federation". If we are to take the anti-federalist project as a means to preserve unjust economic interests and Southern privileges, then our deference for the anti-federalist opposition collapses into considerations of "bad federation" strategies. In a restrictive sense, the "good federation" is achieved by eliminating what proved to be obstructive in various historical contexts of federal conceptions and institutions. On the other hand, what is "good" today may be obsolete and inadequate tomorrow, while a certain "bad" state of things can be the starting point for improvements and corrections. That is our best hope - the fact that "a more perfect" federalism is possible one way or another.

3. REPUBLICANISM

From originalism to revisionism

The most difficult task to undertake when it comes to examining an ideology is to establish, as accurately as possible, its referential context, characteristics, historical evolution and main theoretical and practical denotations which have shaped and delineated it from other ideological orientations in relation to which the ideology in question could have interfered. If this is the case, when considering republicanism, it comes to searching for solid arguments in support of tackling republicanism from an ideological standpoint, in order to avoid ambiguities, errors and even overlaps in terminology. The modern republic has been the predominant political reality of most governmental systems. More often than not, the ideological substance of republican governments needs a complement in order to allow for accurate diagnoses (e.g., liberal republic, democratic republic, popular republic, conservative republic, etc.). However, republicanism - as an ideology properly - originated in the classical approaches of Aristotle, Polybius or Cicero, was overtly debated in the modern works of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Harrington, Sidney, Trenchard, or Bolingbroke (Castiglione 2005, 453-465), and rejuvenated by complex syntheses of contemporary times, which claimed validity of "neo-republicanism" (Philip Pettit), or of the so-called "republican synthesis" (J. G. A. Pocock).

Consistent with this treasured tradition is the question of whether and how ideological republicanism could be canvassed in the United States. In attempting to answer this question, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the very influential school of "republican revisionism" (Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Joyce Appleby and others) has tried to rehabilitate the republican idea to the detriment of the dominant Lockean liberal model, with the aim of defining the republican ideology as a normative political discourse. I am not interested to determine how "republican revisionism" criticised, amended and completed the fundamental republican principle (i.e., promotion of civic virtues) which formed the basis of the entire tradition of civic humanism with its specific connotations; nor am I committed to equate the republican ideology with the political agendas of the Republican Party solely. If I were to do so, I would be mistaken; moreover, the very historical evolution of the Republican Party would disprove such narratives. Especially in the period 1789-1820s, until the Jacksonian period, all prominent political actors of the time justified their political options by recourse to republican values, although - as I will show later on - some nuances are particularly interesting. If it is true that the republican tradition was revived by Machiavelli’s writings, one of the most profound intuitions of the Florentine political thinker should be followed: like all Renaissance thinkers, Machiavelli generally pleaded for the understanding of something at the intersection between vita activa and vita contemplativa and this rumination should serve as an additional argument for the inseparability between practical and ideological republicanism. Thus, the understanding of republicanism as a distinctive ideology becomes consistent with assessing republicanism as a developing process from the originalist intention to outgrowths signalled by revisionists. The construction of republican ideology in six development stages stands for the representation of its semantic plethora in the course of American history, according to the following chronology: i) federalist republicanism, 1789-1829; ii) nationalist republicanism, 1833-1860; iii) abolitionist republicanism, 1861-1877; iv) corporate republicanism, 1880-1920; v) conservative republicanism, 1921-1933, 1981-1989; vi) militarist republicanism, 1952-1975, 2001-2008.

Confronting federalism in the (post)founding era

Probably the most intricate aspect related to the origins and meanings of the republican ideology in the founding period is that of the conjunction between the federalist design and the new republican order envisaged by the Founding Fathers as a stark political amendment to the monarchic order. The new political order had been long prepared and anticipated by certain provisions of colonial constitutions. In addition, the liberal secessionist spirit that culminated in the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the Federal Constitution, had steadily marked the transition from the British colonial dominance, through the federation of states, towards the unitary federal state (Adams 2004, 127). The difficulty of establishing the meanings of republicanism in a federal context is corroborated with uncertainties regarding the origins of the American republican conception. On the one hand, a school of thought dedicated to the rehabilitation of republicanism, labeled as neo-Whig or idealist (Bailyn, Wood, Pocock), promoted interpretations of American revolutionary ideals consistent with the republican vocabulary, which, in its turn, descended from a series of conceptual dichotomies, such as "virtue/corruption, liberty/tyranny, past/progress, and authenticity/deception" (Michaud 2009, 36). On the other hand, a recent interpretation traced back the genesis of the new American republican order to the republican tradition of Ancient Greece, according to which the primary role of the centralized republican government should be the "egalitarian distribution of property" (Nelson 2004, 199). Thus, the issue of establishing the pedigree of American republicanism further complicates the story: the question remains, still, whether the core of the new republican ideology in the post-founding era was inspired by the concept of civic virtues borrowed from Roman republican thought, or by the liberal idea of unfettered political participation descending from the Greek tradition.

Apart from the quest for certain ideological sources of American republicanism, the founding disputes regarding the meanings of republican constitutional federalism opposed federalists to anti-federalists, whilst the issue of concocting a republican form of government remained unquestioned: James Madison wittingly understood that the most thorny issue in the debates was finding the best solution to fight public corruption (Hart 2002, 66) and that this desideratum should be placed at the heart of republican arrangements. Among the fundamental characteristics of moderate federal republicanism according to Madison (i.e., expansionism, representation, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism (Sheehan 2009, 169)), two of them were exemplary for characterizing the moderate view: if the principle of separation of powers simply points to establishing limitations in regard to potential discretionary use of powers by a branch of government, the principle of checks and balances is the direct expression of the need for public responsibility and accountability to the people. In pressing historical circumstances, in which the Founding Fathers, often against their will, had to concede too many prerogatives to the executive, the working solution was, once again, a compromise, "by republicanizing the executive, through regular elections and a written constitution… The Americans mixed the strength of monarchical government with the requirements of republicanism" (Spalding 2006, 184). Eventually, following ample controversy that had lasted more than a decade after the foundation of the new republic, the conciliation between Hamiltonian political economism and Madisonian republican views on politics was grounded on a pragmatic compromise: they reached consensus about founding federal republicanism on the pillars of "national capital, national bank, national taxing power, and a standing army" (Hart 2002, 64).

The guiding principles of the new republican government ignited the nationalist temper, although the conception of federalist republicans hinted beyond this narrow purpose, with a view to expanding domestic Western expansionism and earning wide international recognition. The premises of national republicanism can be found in Jefferson’s emphasis on the ideas of unleashing democratic participation and guaranteeing individual liberties. However, Jefferson’s case is particularly difficult to clarify, as Jefferson himself, who had initially pleaded in favor of the anti-federalist project, substantially revised his stance after retirement from political life, especially during the 1820s until his death. His theoretical studies of salient classic works on republicanism, the translation of Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s commentary on Montesquieu, commitment to the rising nationalist rhetoric that changed the republicans’ original positions after the War of 1812, and especially the vast correspondence with his former political rival, John Adams, all make Jefferson the most complex figure around whom all uncertainties of the federalist republican layout coalesced (Hart 2002, 128-131). The fact that the Democratic-Republican Party split several times, especially during Jefferson’s administration, was the very proof of troublesome political realities resulting from ideological controversies on the impractical role of republicanism (see, for instance, John Randolph's 1805 initiative of founding the Quids minority as a faction of Southern Republicans) (Shankman 1999, 43-72). Be that as confusing as it may, democratic republicanism at the turn of the nineteenth century, ideologically defended by Jefferson's party, was the only serious counterweight to the centralizing tendencies advocated by federalists.

Turning democratic and nationalist in the Jacksonian era

A plausible interpretation of the origins of American republicanism should emphasize on the idea of democratic political participation to res publica; this approach, purporting evident pragmatic and procedural connotations, was not an issue of the original debate on the republican project. The idea of political participation in a republican regime could be equivocally placed in the Greek tradition. Thus, a more comprehensive interpretation of further development and enhancement of the originalist ideological republicanism has to incorporate the ecclesiological vocabulary as well. This interpretation model on the origins of the secular state and public institutions has entered the space of secularized political language; thus, the civic ideal of pax Romana was the mirroring expression of the theological faith in fraterna Christianitas (Alzati 2007, 3-25).

In American context, the original republican ideal, expression of the primacy of civic virtues and widespread participation in public affairs, dilated the secular urge in order to appropriate the Christian universalist ideology and values. Moreover, religious life in the New World had already been the paragon for the concatenation of spiritual values with voluntary associations for public purposes. Consequently, given the amalgamation of religious values and public endeavors within a prevailing secular ethos, the new way had to enfranchise republican idealism in order to include a markedly democratic and populist rhetoric. In other words, one could discover the genesis of democratic republicanism in the context of this trend of development. Democratic republicanism in the United States became the leading propaganda of the American government starting with Andrew Jackson’s administration, which not only dominated the ideological aspirations of the newly refurbished Democratic Party, but also catalyzed the Republican Party split into the wings of federal/ old Republicans, and the moderate/ democratic Republicans, respectively. The latter faction took the name of Whig Party and became the guardian of ideological republicanism in the pre-Civil War period, as via media agent between old federal republicans and nationalist democrats.

To some extent, the ideology of republicanism acquired a democratic aura due to rendition in secular terms of the prevailing Protestant ethos. By and large, the first American generations understood that fulfilling the three fundamental tenets of republicanism enunciated by Madison (i.e., representation, limitation of power and control of government) was tantamount to acknowledging the civic duty of active commitment to general public causes. Consequently, under the Protestant spell, one of the most virtuous worldly missions was associated to ardent participation in public affairs, so that a true believer was a responsible citizen simultaneously. Alongside to this lofty interpretation regarding the democratization of republicanism, there were also other concurrent and more trivial explanatory reasons for the transformative character of republicanism. Thus, the republican ideology turned increasingly democratic based on the rise of Jacksonian demagogic populism.

In addition, animated by the 1823 Monroe doctrine, the nationalist feeling started to infiltrate original republicanism. Specifically, the other two Madisonian attributes of republicanism (i.e., expansionism and federalism) propelled the nationalist impetus in the Jacksonian era. In a sense, empowering the federal republic with a view to legitimize expansionism to the West had been consistent with giving the green light to the republican government for undertaking a more assertive posture, beyond its originalist purpose. Because of the contamination of republican civic credentials with the federal proneness towards dominating power and executive centralization, I would call the above-mentioned transformation "the federalization of republicanism". In addition, the energizing stimulus of nationalist republicanism brought about self-aggrandizement and affirmative willingness as refreshing characteristics of the young republic, twisting its rather airy aspirations. The three major nationalist doctrines formulated by the Whig republicans John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams were cases in point. Calhoun’s nationalist republicanism, tagged as "War Department nationalism", put an ideological emphasis on security defense to the detriment of citizens' liberties and endorsed national prosperity and federal enforcement of connections between the states of the union more forcefully than granting federal accountability to particular constituent states. Later on, in a speech given in the House of Representatives, Calhoun added the fourth component to his nationalist program: the building of a system of roads and canals. In particular, Calhoun’s urge reiterated one fundamental passion of federalist republicans, that of consolidating and reforming the standing army (Calhoun 1969). The second important political program of nationalist republicanism belongs to Henry Clay and is better known as "the American system". The elements of his program - nationalist legislation, cementation of the Union, improvement of internal trade, and augmentation of wealth and population (Remini 1991) - curbed civic individualism and debunked suspicion towards the patronage of federal government. The last view, much more in agreement with republicans’ liberating ideals, was endorsed by John Quincy Adams and could be deemed as "enlightened nationalism". Adams’s ideological program insisted upon the importance of international recognition of the young American republic and the role of education and religion in public life (in this latter aspect he emphasized the need for establishing a national university) (Lipsky 1950). These three programs tried to adapt the traditional republican ideology to the growing nationalization of public feelings in the United States during the Jacksonian age. In contraposition, republicans attempted to denounce the high level of corruption posing as national interest and followed their old peers in blaming the tyranny of majority as a serious threat to the republican order (Monroe 2003, 50-54). In brief, all nationalist agendas favored federal empowerment and diluted republican purposes. Because of these drawbacks, Jacksonian nationalism invariably declined, additionally because of the onset of exceptionalism which, in the 1840s, criticized the isolationism of the United States under the Monroe doctrine.

From abolitionism to recognition and inclusion

Serious economic challenges and intensification of the expansionist rhetoric of exceptionalism prompted – as early as the mid-1940s – the steep decline of nationalism and the discomposure of American political life. Along the way, republicanism had to confront continual disenfranchisement of its ideological prerequisites. It is well-known that, ever since the foundation of the republic, two distinct views on the US economic development had led to antagonistic ideological commitments. The old republicans had not deviated from the original Hamiltonian view regarding the need for rapid industrialization and conflicted with the supporters of Jeffersonian agrarianism, who formed the constituency of the Democratic Party in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. The preference for industrialization imposed a certain political behavior and economic agenda, so that, beginning with the 1840s, abolitionism had become the cornerstone of republican political discourse, be it moderate or radical. The level of discontent increased and political life became divided in an unprecedented fashion. Two other republican-oriented factions bordered on the old republicans and Whig moderates fights for the abolitionist cause. The Liberty Party had purported solid republican and liberal views within a markedly abolitionist agenda since its foundation in 1839, and a more pregnant activism for the same cause was carried out by the Free-Soil Party in the period 1848-1854. On the other side, in the 1850s, the nativist-xenophobe party known as the Know-Nothing Party generated further political tensions, so that the political disturbances in mid-nineteenth century America came to reflect the growing liberalization of economy and the ever more diverse economic interests of Northeastern industrialists in regard to agrarian economy of the South. Thus, ideological liberalism mixed with egalitarian abolitionism, foreshadowing major conflicts in the American political life. Adding the professionalization of political parties’ actions, the increasing privatization of small rural manufacturing and the consolidation of urban bourgeoisie, the overall panorama of the Civil War era revealed both the transformative ethos and the turbulent status quo of the time (Henretta 2004, 165).

Some scholars consider that Lincoln’s substantial merit was that of having been able to gradually eliminate the factions inside the Republican Party and to reunite it around a common ideology focused on the abolition of the old slavery-based economic system (Wagner 2007, 19-28). However, this does not mean that it was only inside the old Republican Party that such divisive tensions were evident. The populist-democratic stance of the Democratic Party had also lost its call, prompting distancing of Whigs who contributed in this way to the awakening of the Republican party in the period of 1860 presidential campaign. After the end of the Civil War, the Republicans sought to maintain their dominance in American politics by advocating both equalitarian and liberal principles. The political finality of egalitarian abolitionism was incorporated into three constitutional amendments granting citizenship and political rights to freedmen, while the enforcement of liberal economic interests was achieved by the right to franchise. However, the practical realities of American public life in the Reconstruction period revealed the utopianism of political egalitarianism, reinforcing at the same time the dimension of economic liberalism, so that the desiderate of economic liberalization eventually became the cornerstone of corporate republicans’ options. Moreover, the idealist consequences of abolitionism were countered by the Jim Crow segregation laws or by the "separate but equal" legal doctrine. This is precisely why, especially in the twentieth century, the ideology of liberal pluralism has gradually abandoned the unrealistic vocabulary of egalitarian doctrines: within more and more complicated theoretical and practical republican dilemmas, concepts such as 'recognition' and 'inclusion' have become relevant examples for the obsolescence of equalitarianism and the ambiguity of equality concept (Honohan 2002, 250-289). However, the egalitarian ideology has continued to largely impregnate feminist and new left aspirations up to these days.

Historically, abolitionist republicanism could not have endured beyond the adoption of legislation eliminating slavery, in circumstances in which even the egalitarian spirit has faded away. However, this does not mean that, because of the defunct principles that initiated it, the historical and political consequences of abolitionist republicanism were not impactful. The current understanding of democratic republicanism imposes the requirement of moving beyond any barriers as far as the concept of political participation of citizens to res publica is concerned, and guarantees one’s full citizenship rights (Sandel 1996; Taylor 1979).

Experiencing incapacity to confront the spoils-system and industrial monopolies

"One conviction that troubled Weber was that politics could no longer regenerate republican government and restore the classical ideas of the past. For Weber perceived, as did Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville a half century earlier, that the modern political state would not be able to withstand the economic and social forces that would absorb it" (Diggins 1985, 572). This reference tells, in nuce, the story of republicanism in the gilded age of industrial corporatism: both the fierce economic competition among major economic interest groups and the progressive and populist reactions against the domination of the whole economic life by big businesses portrayed the economic and, respectively, social forces that dominated the period between 1880 and 1920, an age I would term "corporate republicanism".

The presidential administration of Ulysses S. Grant symbolized, for the first time, at the end of Reconstruction, the cooperation between the Republican Party and big businesses, with political and economic consequences of great magnitude (Wagner 2007, 32). Also, the traditional republican ideology crumbled for the first time in its first century-long history of the United States: industrial plutocracy and conspicuous financial interests put a great deal of pressure on politics to the point of taking complete control over it. Evidently, big bosses and plutocrats needed a new ideological legitimacy in place of the old republican creed, legitimacy which they found in the social-Darwinist philosophy of Herbert Spencer and his American followers. The survival of the fittest doctrine in the circumstances of extreme economic competition became the new ideological justification and the rejuvenation of laissez-faire classic liberal principles. Thus, the republican government could no longer escape the invasion of big money and corporate lobby; the logical consequence of this situation was comprehensive political corruption and large-scale institutionalisation of the spoils-system mechanism (Green 2009, 57-61). Also, between the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, aggressive political interventionism was added to corporate economic domination, forming the picture of a nation that was aware of its potency for the first time in its history. Consequently, the assault on republican principles seemed overwhelming: popular representation of general interests was poisoned by the insidious entrenchment of big money interests, the functioning of checks-and-balances mechanism was obstructed by the "iron triangle" strategies, limitation of power influence was considerably curtailed, industrial boom dictated expansionist criteria, and federal power increased in consequence of corrupted loyalties between politicians and big bosses.

The economic domination of large corporations gave impetus to power politics, in the sense that two Republican presidents, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, abandoned the nationalist tenets and Monroe’s isolationist doctrine for good, in order to adopt an internationalist hegemonic positioning (Green 2009, 67-73). Under such circumstances, critics of corporate republicanism denounced the association of big corporations and economic and financial interests, on the one hand, and the political lobby, on the other, as detrimental to the founding values of the federal republic. The ramifications of corporate republicanism have extended to certain economic routines of the present and can be identified - to give but one example - in the "New Power Brokers" ideological organization of right-wing militants (DeLay, Norquist, Rove) (Hacker and Pierson 2005, 135-36). Warning against the dominance of American political and economic organisations in the form of monopolistic institutions and industries, widespread criticism in contemporary United States associates the old republican ideology of natural aristocracy and the Republican Party to fascist corporate mentality (Burrell 3008, 6-14).

At any rate, the common assumption of all these critiques is that the aim of corporate republicanism was "the conquest of the state" (Hodges 2003, 38) by means of complete monopoly over prevailing economic interests. Hodges identified the contamination of original republicanism with what he called "deep republicanism": "By deep republicanism I mean the post-Polybian development of Machiavelli’s political thought… we go beyond the Anglo-American model of mixed government to a republic without gentlemen in which the state is rich and the citizens are poor with the prospect of becoming virtuous as well" (Hodges 2003, 63). In light of this observation, the populist and progressive reactions came as attempts to temper the corporate monopolizing tendencies. Protests of the masses and the public overall aversion towards the domination of economic life by monopolies prompted sweeping anti-trust legislation in Congress around the turn of the twentieth century.

Embracing conservative precepts after the First World War

As early as the end of the nineteenth century, several Republican administrations tried to curb corporatism and big businesses, but accusations of high-level corruption and general disruption of public harmony eroded societal cohesion and generated widespread disbelief regarding the momentum of traditional ideological values in coping with public anxieties. President William Howard Taft's election to office in 1909 was a tepid endeavor to return to moderation, anticipating the first period of conservative republicanism at the end of World War I. The period between 1921 and 1933 was characterized by a conservative traditional orientation of the Republican Party, with a view to rehabilitate the old republican principles, including the inward-looking positioning of the United States after the war and the return to isolationism. Thus, it was not by accident that Woodrow Wilson's internationalist liberal program was rejected by Congress in 1921.

By and large, the dominating conservative mindset has been elucidative for understanding the ideological ventures, political behaviors and policy orientation of the Republican Party ever since the end of the First World War. First, between 1921 and 1933, the return to definite conservative traditions of infant America had a markedly isolationist character and consistently revived ideological republicanism; the moderate republicanism of the age of "good feelings" endorsed conservatism even in the absence of eminent conservative ideologues, under the momentum of certain strategic governmental policies. Then, prompted by general disillusionment of formerly idealist intellectuals of the interwar period, the movement of neo-conservatism shifted towards geopolitical assertiveness and Americanism at the beginning of the Cold War era and descended from William F. Buckley's establishment of National Review in 1955. Within a favorable ideological context for rejuvenating republicanism, the first generation of neoconservatives of the 1950s were less preoccupied to defend republican values at home and more committed to export them by means of public diplomacy. Advocacy of international open societies, repudiation of collectivism, endorsement of political participation and demand for civil societies were marks of the outward-looking republicanism of US propaganda during the ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Succinctly, republican conservatism in the period 1921-1933 championed the return to the idea of natural aristocracy, civic morality and free market ideology. With support of Southern Democrats, inter-war conservative republicans maintained domestic segregationist policies and the conservative-republican principle of federal non-interference in economy and public affairs. That is the reason why Franklin D. Roosevelt called the conservative detractors of New Deal policies "economic royalists" (Burrell 2008, 9-17). The revolt against administrative government, paternalism and social engineering of the New Deal policies further expanded into two major ideological directions after 1945: the libertarian stance of minimal government influenced by Milton Friedmann's economic writings doubled by the libertarian philosophical theories of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, and the neo-conservative reinterpretation of Burke's classic conservatism in a work published by Russell Kirk in 1953 (Tanner 2007, 19-60). In any manner, the conservative ideology was consistently assumed by republicans, especially after 1955, regardless of whether one hinted at the realist conservatism of Nixon, or to Reagan the idealist (Dueck 2010, 142-88, 189-231).

Fomented during the interwar era, the conflict between liberals and conservatives encapsulated contrary interpretations of republicanism: while the liberal one epitomized the role of federal management of public interests in order to reach efficiency and consensus, the conservative understanding pinpointed at individual freedom and public enterprise as conspicuous attitudes in the spirit of genuine republicanism. The opposition between conservative apostles of traditional and religious values and liberal "secular humanists" led to an ample ideological fervor bringing to fore, on the conservative side, Leo Strauss as the mentor of idealist conservatives, and Sir Isaiah Berlin, the pundit of liberal pluralism, on the other (Shorris 2004). Even if, in the 1950s, the conservative mindset envisaged the possibility of rehabilitating republican ideals, in the manner in which Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca argued for the role of elites to this end (Brock 2004, 70), the more recent plea of high-minded conservatism for upholding the idea of natural aristocracy has become the favorite target of criticism because of its growing departure from widespread moderate views of the general public (Hacker and Pierson 2005, 25). The lofty conservatism of the 1980s made large-scale recourse to propaganda sponsored by powerful conservative enterprises, think tanks, academic milieus and well-known conservative publications (Brock 2004, 54), with a view to popularizing conservative republicanism in three basic regards: fiscal responsibility and tax reduction, national security, and moral standards and family values (Goodall and Wiener 2008, 142-43). The fact is that "…in the 1950s and 1960s, Democratic and Republican elites were relatively heterogeneous, with a liberal Rockefeller Republican wing and a cadre of conservative Southern Democrats. But by the 1990s and 2000s, elites were more sharply polarized, with most Democrats on the left and most Republicans on the right" (Levendusky 2009, 2). The battle for the soul of republicanism rejuvenated both factions in distinct periods of time: republicans in the 1950s and 1980s, due to open society propaganda and opposition to big government politics, and democrats in the 1960s and 1970s, due to anti-war activism and support for civil rights movement. Paradoxically enough, in the present, republicans seem to be more alienated from the spirit of republicanism in comparison with the democratic propaganda preserved within confinements of leftist-inspirited criticism.

Loaded republicanism: American ideological militarism in post-war geopolitics

Throughout time, one could argue that the expansionist instinct of republicans has gradually become more and more radical, up to the extremely problematic association between republicanism and the militarist ideology. The dialectics of republicanism as incremental militarism can be constructed on several levels, in the sense that the negative development, intractably confined within the dialectic method, acquires a cathartic connotation, rather than a constructive one. Conceiving militarism as a pragmatic tool either to contain communism or thwart isolationism has remained a constant ideological endeavor until the assertive positivity of muscular politics under the Bush doctrine in the aftermath of 9/11. In other words, starting with Eisenhower's administration, republican militarism has been directed either against internal isolationist liberalism or against external socialism (Burrell 2008, 19). Furthermore, in the manner in which the nationalist-populist rhetoric called for the extermination of native Americans, as they were considered obstacles to American progress, contemporary militarist orientations have called upon the indispensability of belligerence as strong ideological justification of the security axiom.

Another possibility for dialectically construing American militarism throughout history could be illustrated as follows: at first, the exceptionalist and imperialist moment at the end of the nineteenth century aimed at consolidating the US geostrategic position through annexing or controlling vast regions of the American continent through the use of the emancipator's rhetoric. The second moment coincided with the bipolar division of the world during the Cold War, when American militarism served the justification for ideological propaganda against communism and totalitarianism. Finally, the synthesis of these two moments, and at the same time the peak of American militarism, was reached by what I would term the absolute holistic militarism of George W. Bush as a way of responding aggressively to international terrorism (Dueck 2010, 39-84). The common denominator of all militarist ideological approaches has been the predilection towards the organization of the security system on the basis of consolidating and expanding the standing army to the detriment of local militias that were preferred during the defensive system of classical republicanism (Hart 2002, 204-205). Therefore, throughout time, one has witnessed the gradual rise of American interventionism and aggressiveness which, additionally fueled by Christian fundamentalism and by the obsession regarding the US role as world policeman, has led to militarist fanaticism during George W. Bush's two terms in office. In light of such an interpretation, the corruption of original American republicanism took the postmodern facet of what might be indicative for self-destructive political pathology.

More often than not, the justifications for militarist actions took perverted forms: for instance, under the desideratum of cosmopolitan citizenship ideal, recent American militarism has stirred all global political regimes to commitments for reaching a so-called common purpose (i.e., elimination of terrorism), overlooking that the issue of militarized global justice, above all considerations regarding international law norms, raises serious ethical dilemmas (Chung 2004, 117). In one of the latest attempts to legitimize the propaganda of American militarism, one finds out that the "missile gap" is used as ideological justification for military interventions against Iran and North Korea; this reasoning is a recurrent one, if one looks back to recapitulate the rhetoric of radical republican militarists during the Cold War (Burrell 2008, 21).

Is republicanism an ideology proper?

The development of ideological republicanism in the United States has permeated both the substantial principles of classic Greco-Roman republicanism and the doctrine of modern liberalism. Considering its lofty principles, sublime aspirations and philosophical character, republicanism could be grasped as a kind of receptacle, a propitious environment for further positive conceptions on politics, instead of an ideology proper. If this is the case, one could criticize republicanism in terms of ideological relativism. One recent historian of republicanism, Gordon S. Wood, in his work The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, argues that the republican ideological tradition was shaped in an uncertain way, under the influence of Enlightenment republican ideology, but gradually excoriated its originalist meanings. What is nowadays called the "republican synthesis" is rather suggestive for a more or less comprehensive ideology within which various pundits have tried to place a political development specific to modernity through concealment of arcane ideological concerns. Consequently, what has been salient about the republican creed either turned into unfathomable hypotheses about politics, or was purely absorbed within other ideological frameworks. In this latter instance, one could argue about the legitimizing and enabling characteristics of republicanism per se.

Whatever the case, my contention is that the republican ethos has been momentous in different periods of American political development. If it was not for the republican political agendas properly to unmistakably shape specific developments, at least they accompanied certain positive reforms and prevented misconducts, power excesses and deviations towards autarchic political behaviors and practices. Recapitulation of some evolving routes specific to the American republican tradition should include, first and foremost, the founding moment of federalist republicanism which stood for the constitutive, idealist, and institutionally positive reactions of the founders in the service of establishing a republican order based on guaranteeing political representation, promotion of civic virtues, and demand for public duty. The succeeding nationalist-democratic moment amended the original idealism and introduced the requirement of large civic participation of the masses to res publica, yet hypocritically obscuring the issue of racial inequality. The period of abolitionist republicanism denounced the principled contradiction of the previous moment and eventually surmounted the divisive spirit of the time by promoting a political agenda inspired by egalitarian principles. In the context of prevalent economic monopolies and financial elites, the capitalist-corporatist stage of development denied the possibility of universalizing the principle of equality, as a result of national aristocracy's retaliation and Social Darwinism, and obscured republican improvements as well. More recently, conservative republicanism maximized the classic liberal principle of economism and non-regulative state, while militarist republicanism endorsed the ideology of centralized military power, insisting upon the global momentum of fighting totalitarianism and terrorism.

Still, most scholars feel the need to place republicanism on solid normative grounds. In my view, republican revivalism has been recently characterized by three distinct outlooks that are rather perspectivist than essentialist. The first, in Hannah Arendt, was normative and referred to the conceptual reconsideration of civic virtues. Advocated mainly by Charles Taylor, the second is procedural and highlights the extension of political participation. The third direction is instrumentalist and argues for reconsidering republicanism not as a composite of self-referential values and virtues, but in the context of contemporary pluralist and liberal republics; Will Kimlycka is the proponent of this view. As such, the debate on republicanism is far from being definitive and future revisions will probably have to tackle populist entrenchments, illiberalisms and/ or inherent unresponsiveness in coping with contextual challenges.

4. NATIONALISM

The tricky avatars of an ideology

More than most modern ideologies, nationalism requires attitudes of commitment and engagement consistent with attachments to fatherland, mother-country and/ or land of the ancestors, as the cultural norm of reference requires. Be it in the form of emotional devotion, militancy and/ or solipsistic and pseudo-epistemic frame of mind, the nationalist zeal is, paradoxically, the most enticing and, simultaneously, the most elusive by comparison with other ideological pursuits. Essentially related to one of the above-mentioned loyalty patterns, one could not be sure about its distinct ideological marks; instead, other ideologies purport certain traits, so that nationalism functions as a kind of side effect of those specific ideological approaches. In other words, other ideologies provide the rationale, while nationalism is the driving impetus (Mosse 1985, 9). It would seem more plausible to assert that, in different historical contexts and considering the issue at hand, nationalism has been rather impactful or instrumental for ideologies such as conservatism, liberalism or socialism. To put it differently, "nationalism is a cultural form readily adaptable to a wide range of contexts and open to a variety of ideological contents" (Fousek 2000, 4).

But this is one side of story. As modern nationalism starting with the first decades of the nineteenth century has revealed, irrationalism and dogmatism were supplemented by constructive and emancipative types of attitudes stimulated by loyalty to one’s nation. That is to say, the nationalist endeavors have been probably grounded on - and ultimately elevated by - certain cognitive bearings, concrete interests, legitimate ideals and goals, and/ or inherited patriotic sentiments. This is all the more so in the case of American nationalism: according to both supporters and detractors, American nationalism fundamentally rests on a set of guiding principles to be used as justifications for a 'more perfect' future. Consequently, two main traits should be elicited when considering American nationalism: its civic nature and its future-oriented propensity.

The civic character of American nationalism was an opportune appropriation of the republican tenet of civism and spoke against the long historical traditions of most European countries founded on ethnic nationalism. The ethnic characteristic is descriptive for the preservation of a nation due to its shared historical origins, territory, culture, language, customs, etc. Its counterpart, civic nationalism, is incorporated to a set of shared ideas, values and beliefs coalescing a collective mindset and guiding large consensus, enthusiasm and future action. While ethnic nationalism is pervasively organic and essentialist, its civic alternative is culturally constructed, in the sense of inspiring a specific political culture. Resulting from a civic endorsement of values and beliefs, the idea of nation has been depicted in various conceptual terms, such as an "imagined community" (Anderson 1983), a "product of modernization" (Gellner 1983), or an experiment in "social engineering" (Hobsbawm 1983), to mention but a few of the most notorious renderings. Since the end of the colonial era, civic nationalism in the New World has been continuously constructed as unique in its character and universal in its aspirations; moreover, due to its original composition of multiple ethnic strains, one classic scholar of nationalism in the United States called the new federalist and republican political enterprise "the universal nation" (Kohn 1957, 138).

On the other hand, there are complementary explanation models to the civic nationalist ideology in the United States which postulate other compositional ingredients stemming from national interests, public good and/ or a peculiar sentiment of patriotism. While national interests and public good have been conceived as reasons in the service of assertive nationalism, patriotism has been invoked as the utmost devotion towards the American nationalist idea. Reflecting upon the mainstream strategies of the United States in twentieth century foreign affairs, Hans Morgenthau distinguished between emotionalist nationalism visible in foreign policy actions such as humanitarian interventions and pacifist intentions, and substantially realist and rational nationalism consistent with strategic national interests. However, the legitimacy of national interests has been severely obscured by "subnational, other-national and supranational interests" (Morgenthau 1952, 973). One can push forward the distinction between embodied nationalism enclosed within certain ethnic limitations pertaining to common territorial, linguistic and cultural homogeneities, and what I would call ‘pledged nationalism’ founded on a principled civic consent regarding the ever-changing nature of ideas, values and beliefs, and fundamentally future-oriented. Accordingly, civic nationalism has been designed and imagined as inclusive of all potential and heterogeneous realities, as a promise of the self-fulfillment of future generations.

Though, it should be noted that the nationalist ethos in the United States, albeit civic in character, is far from being plenary: along the historical way of its development, American nationalism has unveiled its penumbras, evils and inner contradictions. In what follows, I will examine the overall merits and shortcomings of American nationalism as an ideology. Therefore, I consider that certain conceptual ascriptions stand for a comprehensive interpretation of the ideology. Thus, the conceptual core of American nationalist ideology should include the 'chosen nation' precept, the expansionist Manifest Destiny, the divided nation thesis, the normative and scientific assumptions of the 'enlightened nation', and - eventually - its 'messianic' urge.

The Chosen Nation: on the conceptual brands of American exceptionalism

Starting in the late colonial period and reinforced during the revolutionary turmoil at the end of the eighteenth century, fecund intuitions and ideas about the privileged status of the New World settlers, the uniqueness of their experience and the predestination of their new political design have started to ferment around an original ideology of nationhood. Certain primordial impetuses which could aptly be characterized as individualistic and libertarian animated a strong civic ethos. In contrast to the character of nationalism in countries like France, Germany or Russia, the American project lacked ethnic and collectivistic traits (Greenfield 1992, 14; Caldwell 2006, 22). I think it was precisely this civic enthusiasm regarding the foundation of the new nation that further generated a subset of correlative ideas, i.e., the exceptional nation, the ideological construction of American identity and character and, eventually, the unshakeable belief in the birth of the new 'chosen nation'.

First and foremost, American exceptionalism has been explored in several ideological directions, as being essentially descriptive with regard to evolutions and developments of American liberal individualism, pluralist and inclusive democratic ethos, as well as internationalist hope of universalism and peace under the inspiration of the American nationalist example. As an epithet of nationalism - among other ideological depictions - American exceptionalism derived from the incipient set of values and beliefs that unified apparently anomic individuals within the borders of a new nation. As such, roughly between the 1790s and the late 1820s, the exceptionalist values which shaped American nationalism had been seized within the transformative practices that guaranteed the effectiveness of the revolutionary war which marked the shift from colonialism to unionism. These values included, inter alia, limited government, opportunity and individual ambition, voluntarism and initiative, emancipation, participation, entrepreneurialism and commercialism (Appleby 2000, 15-23). They not only instilled a sense of shared ideas and mentalities, but also decisively contributed to the shaping of the American Creed. In the ruminations of American intellectuals and ideological framers, the American Creed has been frequently associated to exceptionalism, due to its specificity, ingeniousness and boldness. They thought that no other nation could parallel the conditions and starting premises of the new American political culture. In fact, one could find the beginnings of "creedal nationalism" in the United States by simply going back to the age of the Declaration of Independence, whose text ignited a model of political system and society "in simple terms" (Smith 2018, 14). Moreover, the American Creed simultaneously stood at the foundations of "compulsive nationalism" and "dogmatic liberalism" (Hartz 1955, 225-237): this statement suggests the meaningful plethora of the creed in its capacity of enabling the shared heritage of the American people together with their strong individualist mindset and private initiative. Other famous American intellectuals, such as Hans Kohn, Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Schlesinger, were sure in their belief that the American Creed was the cornerstone of ideological nationalism (Swain and Nieli 2003, 16-20).

Second, there was the search for a distinct identity and character that scholars identified as the driving force of American nationalism. Once again, depending on the desired future of the new union of former colonies, Americans took at least two different paths: on the one hand, supporters of a future agrarian and markedly individualist America embraced Jeffersonianism; on the other, the founders who shared the view of nationalization of resources and centralization of government imagined a completely divergent evolution of the United States. In a nutshell, the Jeffersonian consensualist model of affective and sentimental nationalism strongly opposed the Hamiltonian authoritarian design of industrial nationalism (Balogh 2009, 49, 115). But there was something deeper than this over-simplistic and mercantile way of framing early American nationalism. Acknowledging that the achievement of political unionism represented only an intermediary step forward, the first Americans aimed at the overarching reconstruction of formerly elitist colonial morals through "literacy, social mobility, enhanced wealth and participatory politics" (Appleby 2000, 262-263). The emancipative nature of incipient nationalism in the United States gains further merits if one considers, for instance, the fact that proto-nationalist Noah Webster was the first American to undertake the difficult task of imposing standards for spelling and pronunciation in English (Balogh 2009, 70). Moreover, one peculiar and notable facet of the new American character was the fact that, between the foundation of the federal republic and the early 1830s, approximately 400 autobiographies were published (Appleby 2000, 23). These facts illustrate the relentless efforts of many Americans not only to strive to succeed, but also to educate future generations in respect to what this land of opportunity could offer and how they could collectively share a certain pattern of experience. More precisely, it was the unique character of the American experience that encompassed the definition of American national identity as "unique common destiny, unique common strengths, and unique common ideals" (Caldwell 2006, 19).

In my view, the most profound stimulus for the early American nationalism was the spiritual idea of the 'chosen nation'. In a sense, this dogmatic interpretation of the American people's destiny and mission completed the traits of secular civic nationalism and fueled the consensus for a civil religion (Bellah 1975). Moreover, religious tolerance, conceived as a fundamental freedom in the first amendment to the Constitution, had a paramount contribution to strengthening secular nationalism in the United States (Bellah 1967, 1-21) and prompted an almost mystical understanding of civic values and liberties. Puritanism of the first pilgrims, further inherited by the first generations of Americans, revived three salient ideals of Hebrew nationalism: "the chosen people, the covenant, and the Messianic expectancy" (Kohn 1965, 16). In a sense, the mythology of the chosen people added the predestination dogma to the future-oriented nature of messianic mysticism. Under the spell of the Second Great Awakening, the belief in the chosen American nation, "the Israel of our time" (Melville 1967, 150), gained momentum and inflicted positive meanings beyond mere bigotry. As the idea of chosen nation was a fruitful ideological instrument in the service of the nineteenth century political goals, its sequel, messianism, became the key dogma underlying American foreign policy of the twentieth century; accordingly, it is worth separate consideration in the last part of this chapter.

The Expansionist Nation: Manifest Destiny in nineteenth century America

In a sense, the quest for meaningful expressions of identity and character in the United States and their encapsulation in what has been called the American Creed stand for the Americans' cultural, social, political and economic claims in their confrontation with the realities of the New World. Ultimately, their voluntary struggle and efforts to find a specific 'American way' of life and experience paved the way to the postulation of the unique character thesis which revealed the exceptional nature of their endeavors and accomplishments. By and large, the ideology of exceptionalism - that could hardly be represented in autonomous terms and pragmatic concepts, irrespective to a specific correlation with the nationalist doctrine - stands for the symbolic representation of certain traits which mark the specificity of the 'American soul'. However, one could not elude the fact that the American nation did not inherit a long-lasting historical tradition, distinct cultural customs, a common language and territory, but, on the contrary, had to invent itself based on purely civic credentials, out of diverse, disharmonious and peculiar individual habits of European immigrants. In retrospect, considering the present ideological characteristics of American nationalism and the fact that exceptionalism is, perhaps, its most illustrative epithet, one could significantly argue for the development of the American nation as an exceptional achievement as well.

Indeed, the story of territorial mapping of the United States through gradual acquisitions and expansion is an ideological saga. It started at the end of the eighteenth century with the more modest and wishful-thinking aspirations of George Washington and his fellow founding fathers for edifying an exemplary American civilization which they intuitively called 'empire' (Cerami 2003, 259). At the time, little they knew about the more than allegorical expression of a mere exceptional desideratum. Notoriously lionized under the name of Manifest Destiny, the American expansionist nationalism has acquired both historical consistency and exceptional aura. Historically, expansionist nationalism had to abandon first the versatile policies of pragmatic and onerous alliances with France and Great Britain. On the one hand, the early fragile American nation at the start of the nineteenth century succeeded in overcoming several maneuvers of defensive and sea confrontations with France (Trautsch 2018, 107-108), and accomplished one of the most brilliant strategic moves in US history by purchasing the Louisiana territory in 1803 and doubling its land ownership. On the other, the total war of 1812 against the British Empire paved the way for the American nation's future assertiveness in international politics. Roughly within the historical interval of one century - between the Louisiana Purchase and Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, 1803-1904 - the US expansionist nationalism had been almost completed (Carlisle and Golson 2007, 26-54).

The ideological underpinning of Manifest Destiny, the frontier thesis, was instrumental for justifying both outer conquering westward and inner developments of the acquired territories. The first form of expansionism proved effective mainly through successful military campaigns, while the second had been secured through enfranchisement policies. In the first case, one should mention the military campaigns directed towards the relocation (in most cases) of Native Americans, while in the latter, outstanding policies had been issued in order to enforce federal authority over the new lands and ensure emancipating reforms for conational inhabitants. Remarkable reform initiatives associated to successful expansionist nationalism include, inter alia, the Railroad Act and the Homestead Act (both adopted in 1862) and the cutting-edge idea of conserving the natural resources of the new territories through enforcement of federal policies with regard to national parks. The Manifest Destiny epic included, as its most important chronological pillars, the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the War of 1812, The Monroe Doctrine (1823), the Mexican War (1846-1848), the 1898 War against Spain and Roosevelt's Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904). The only significant breach of the American expansionist nationalism narrative was the Civil War (1861-1865) and the entire post-Jacksonian and pre-Civil War era which brought about ideological sectionalism and de facto secessionism (Morrison 1997). Concisely, the expansionist facet of American nationalism epitomized by the Manifest Destiny ideology had been historically accomplished in two distinct episodes, of the 1840s and the 1890s, respectively.

Within the manifold and transformative mythology of American exceptionalist nationalism, one could identify idiosyncrasies of the "national psyche, a far end of the wilderness dreamscape" (Cerami 2003, 3). This characterization remained valid for the entire nineteenth century nationalist mindset. But, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Manifest Destiny nationalist adventure dramatically turned into hyperbolic internationalist imperialism. Until synthesizing the features of and the rationale behind this radical conversion of US expansionism - i.e., from individualism and uniqueness, Monroe doctrine and Manifest Destiny to self-assured dogmas of superiority and moralism, arrogance and unilateralism - I would add a peculiar perspective on American nationalism which highlighted the specificity of naturalistic nationalism. Highly influenced by romantic European thinkers, Jefferson, the transcendentalist intellectual movement, James Fennimore Cooper, appraisers of the frontier mirage, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Winning of the West (1889) built up a tradition which had gradually realized the ideological shift from the early idealistic naturalization of the nation to achieving bold programs for the nationalization of nature. Their ideological heritage, both in the form of cultural endeavors and public policies, was encapsulated in western movies, the regionalist writings of the 1930s, the Indian Reorganization Act, the Wilderness Act and the enumeration could include other achievements (Kaufmann 1998, 668-690). This perspective leaves room for further research regarding certain insufficiently explored resources of expansionist nationalism such as the late twentieth century environmentalism.

The Divided Nation: on the Janus-faced dogmas of abolitionism, assimilationism and exclusivism

The most divisive and controversial syncope of nationalism in the United States took place in the period between the mid-1830s and the end of the reconstruction era in the 1870s. However, it is worth mentioning that the nationalist gospel succeeded to overcome all external challenges and bolster its momentous goals each time it had to face divisionism and rupture; moreover, the nationalist agenda continued to exploit to its benefit the sequel of these discords long after they had been extinct. By and large, the trauma of the divided nation had to absorb two major categories of antagonisms: the pre-Civil War controversies opposing unionism to sectionalist tendencies, and the post-Civil War disputes on the issue of immigration, opposing assimilationism to exclusivism, respectively. As such, the nationalist ideological traits had been entrapped at the core of these tensions and used as their resolution criteria and justifications.

The first dividing pair of oppositions – unionism versus sectionalism - is referential to the problem of preserving or eliminating the institution of slavery. This controversy covered the largest part of the nineteenth century's first half and generated various political, party-system, economic, social, cultural and racial sectionalisms. To start with what has been called the nationalization of politics on the issue of race in the past two centuries, one should notice the similitude between the divisive strategies of the Republican Party in the nineteenth century (the so-called 'Lincoln strategy') and the conservative and segregationist maneuvers of the Democratic Party in the twentieth century, extolling the Deep Democratic South (Black and Black 2002). In brief, identifying the regional/ sectionalist enemy was the key strategic point which boosted national solidarity around the pressing issue of abolitionism. In close connection to economic sectional interests, the dismantling of the institution of slavery in the United States by the abolitionist program had to confront several timely compromises, of which the Hartford Convention (1814), the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Compromise of 1850, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) were cases in point, not to mention the three original compromises on slavery in the Constitution. In the realm of party politics, the national debate on slavery caused several splits especially on the side of Republicans, with the Whigs carrying out the dominating anti-slavery discourse in the 1830s and 1840s and the Know-Nothings in the 1850s (Link 2003, 121-122). Contrasting the prevalent sectionalist spirit, the movement of cultural nationalism in the pre-Civil War period was searching for the national character, by advocating the ideas of Americanness and like-mindedness between the northern Yankee and the southern gentleman (Taylor 1993).

Interestingly enough, both unionist and sectionalist politics have generated and further perpetuated a long-lasting dispute between white and black nationalisms in the United States. More interesting is the fact that both factions aimed at preserving their racial specificities and, accordingly, defended separatism and segregation. Despite its nationally-framed discourse and agenda, pre-civil War abolitionism was only a contextual movement and rather failed to promote post-bellum anti-racist reforms consistent with its spirit. Instead, despite safeguarding the Union at the end of the Reconstruction era, adverse effects have become dominant in divisive nationalist discourses appropriated by white and black nationalism, respectively. White nationalism was the first to shape an almost ethnic sense of belonging to the New World (Grant 2018, 1-23), under the Puritan spell and the sole character of European immigration. Up to date, it has conserved its racial, xenophobe and segregationist character in various manifestations, more or less radical, such as militancy for the rights of whites, white separatism, white Christian moralism and white suprematism (Swain and Nieli 2003). Also originating in the pre-Civil War era of fierce debates on abolitionism and emancipation of slaves, black nationalism had envisioned the possibility of a massive exodus for the liberated slaves either to Africa or, more plausible, to Central America (Robinson 2001, 17-18); in this way, they rejected any emancipation reform, reintegration and/ or any concept of assimilation, strongly endorsing black cultural autonomy, separatism and resettlement. Radical black nationalism has constantly dissented from the mainstream narrative of inclusive American nationalism and championed anti-assimilation, relocation and self-determination. By and large, there have been two phases of the movement: roughly in the period 1850-1925, classical black nationalism advanced a more radical and uncompromising ideological agenda by endorsing separate statehood through resettlement; after 1945, modern black nationalists have urged either for territorial self-determination or black administration in the communities inhabited by their fellows. Supporters of black nationalism have been mostly educated people; their aspirations are at odds with poor blacks' fascination with the mythology of the American dream (Hochschild 1995, 157). At best, they have admitted a kind of ethnic pluralism based on whites' noninterference in their autonomous public institutions.

The second major fracture which energized and tested the ideology of nationalism pointed at two enduring social phenomena in the United States, namely racism and immigration. In both cases, pros and cons attitudes and justifications divided assimilationists and exclusivists and both claimed to defend their doctrines on behalf of robust nationalism.

Racism became rampant in the aftermath of the Civil War and had two main causes: on the one hand, in the confederate states, there was the retaliation of southern white aristocracy who lost economic and status privileges; on the other, the liberation of blacks brought about serious pressures on labor, difficulties of integration, and social conflicts. Black people and communities had to wait one century until racial discrimination and segregation were formally eliminated. Not only has racism survived through residual prejudices and resentment attitudes of whites, but also a shift happened within the mindset of black intelligentsia in their pleas for racial identity and separation (Kerkering 2003, 4-5). Until the 'negro problem' became a constitutive part of the national agenda, both white and black abolitionists tended to include black people, rather unquestionably, in the fictitious narrative of collective national identity. However, early classical nationalist Daniel Webster put forward a plan envisioning future colonization of both African-Americans and Native Americans (King 2005, 55). Domination by enclosure could be deemed as mostly unpractical, even if it was envisaged as the most practical solution to dismantling the late nineteen-century doctrine of segregation. There has always been a rift between the nationally-furnished American Creed and racism which impeded upon the realization of tolerant nationalism. The impetus of democratic nationalism in the 1930s and the civil rights movement leading to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program were efforts to closing the gap between creedal values and racism.

Moderate exclusivism professed by both white and black nationalists, in the forms of geographical separation and/ or social and cultural segregation, has been the defining attitude towards racism; radical exclusivism in the form of racial extermination was never considered an option. Assimilationists took a more aggressive posture than moderate exclusivists and approached racism in terms of exploitation and oppression of African-Americans (Balibar 1991, 39), while the moderate version of acculturation was rarely imagined as a viable solution to overcoming racism.

On the issue of immigration, assimilationism also received a bad aura: the process implied the existence of a homogenous majority that could legitimately absorb all minorities of immigrants, embracing ethnic nationalism in disguise. Since that was not the case in the United States, the remaining alternative was multiculturalism and defense of group identities and rights. In its turn, until the issuing of Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 and considering that the ratification of several exclusivist pieces of legislation (1882, 1921, 1924) revealed the nationalization of immigration management in the United States (Orchowski 2015, 24-36), exclusivism had been advocated by many purist nationalists in the United States through denial of the multiculturalist principle; in this way, it became formally self-contradictory and illusory, substantially xenophobic and chauvinist. "The pot failed to melt" (King 2005, 5) was but one jocular expression meant to discredit both the exclusivist and the assimilationist models of designing immigration policies. As a matter of fact, both assimilationism and exclusivism of immigrants erroneously propagandized the idea of 'one nation' America. For that reason, the nationalist potboiler failed to discern between the concept of national minorities and the more complex US realities of multiethnic communities (Gagnon and Iacovino 2005, 34).

The Enlightened Nation: the American System, progressivism and the administrative state

Enlightened nationalism is a metaphor used to convey various instantiations of 'rationalizing the nation'. Accordingly, it speaks in terms of (pseudo)scientific theories, rational speculations and sophisticated programs and plans designed to improve the national character. Alternatively endorsed in terms of 'enfranchised nationalism', constructed nationalism and/ or cultural nationalism, the struggle to elicit and purify the national basin had been characteristic for the most part of the nineteenth century and declined by mid-twentieth century. Enlightened nationalism was inaugurated by the clear-cut plans of Jacksonian nationalists in the 1830s and 1840s, known as the 'American System' agenda, deepened in the self-confident imaginary of the progressives starting with the 1870s, and culminated with the overall bureaucratic and regulative programs of the administrative state in the 1930s. Both 'enfranchised nationalism' and 'constructed nationalism' are synonymous/ alternative designations for enlightened nationalism and precisely point to reflective and lucid "ideas or processes through which it is imagined" (Fousek 2000, 4). Fully consistent with Benedict Anderson's understanding of nationalism as a culturally-constructed concept, cultural nationalism is a particular and different species of enlightenment, for it speaks either about the intellectuals' quest for national distinction and originality (i.e., 'Americanness'), or aims at discovering certain "patterns of thinking" (Michaels 1995) allegedly shared by most Americans.

But enlightened nationalism stands for more than its afore-mentioned varieties: it is precisely the embodiment of social engineering. Its inquirers, the progressives, have insidiously looked for the enforcement of ethnic nationalism and the ingenious invention of eugenic criteria for exclusion of the unfit. In defense of ethnic nationalism, the progressive mindset conceived an all-encompassing discriminatory system as scientific justification for exclusions: in order to instill their views on healthy nationalism, progressive historians, economists and anthropologists used hocus-pocus arguments, claimed to deploy updated scientific theories and resorted to purportedly objective experimental data in support of their theories. For the purpose of exemplification, the US Bureau of Census delved into scientific racial classifications as the very rationale for exclusions and eulogized the desired ethnics - whites, Anglo-Saxons and Protestants (King 2005, 44-49). Most of them had been educated in Germany and imported the speculative thought which they effectively used in their visionary ruminations. One such view conceived the system of public schools in the United States so that general culture and historical knowledge could be evacuated to make room for the imposition of (pseudo)scientific disciplines and promotion of "simplistic myths" (Lieven 2004, 61-62) in the service of enlightened nationalism. In respect to eugenism, many progressive intellectuals and militants fashioned their theories with a view to ordain national engineering: they inflexibly postulated the desired national identity and accommodated their reasons for exclusions to fit their dogma. In a sense, this approach is not substantially different from the assimilationist perspective (Norman 2005, 79-84). The commendable vocabulary of eugenics, which also include management of breeding, heredity, racial inferiority and nativism, often made use of cherished terms such as "the national gene pool", "the American phenotype" and "the national stock" (Ordover 2003). While the science of eugenics gave rational justification to American enlightened nationalism, the latter rewarded eugenists through academic recognition and backup legislation.

But what I would call enlightened nationalism in the United States was not restricted to this peculiar style of defending nationalism. In fact, the epithet 'enlightened' hints at the American constant political yearning to use power in order to boost the idea of nationhood by means of lofty programs. In my interpretation, the first experiment in this respect comprised comprehensive and developmental political agendas known as the "American System". Originating in the classical age of Jacksonian nationalism, the American System inaugurated a paradigm of political thinking for the purpose of emancipating and consolidating the domestic infrastructure of the nation. Specifically, the American System national concept summed up three distinct, albeit complementary, plans. Henry Clay's economic nationalism encompassed the strategic network of roads and canals for the improvement of commerce capacities, the benefits of prospective territorial expansion, the idea of enforcing a protective tariff for American goods, and the bid for a strong national bank for the management of currency. John Quincy Adams' elitist view on nationalism particularly urged for the creation of a national university and the installation of a planetary observatory. Last but not least, John C. Calhoun's national security program called for a more assertive US foreign policy, despite the vice-president's markedly agrarian views on economy (Sauers 2010).

The second important step to enhance the national creed in the United States was basically attempted by the intellectual and political movement of progressivism in the aftermath of the Reconstruction period. The vast progressive program of nationalization epitomized reformism, welfarism, administration, expertise, pragmatism, moralism, positivism, and collectivism. It was one of the most intense efforts to shape American nationalism according to allegedly scientific criteria. The central endeavor of progressive economists, historians, political scientists and ideologues was to enforce an alternative strategy to the 'invisible hand' economic doctrine of self-regulating markets and laissez-faire liberalism, by designing the 'visible hand' dogma of scientific administrative state (Leonard 2016, 191). For any progressive, the chief concern was that of replacing liberalization with nationalization: to exemplify, two hardcore supporters of progressivism, Edward Bellamy and Henry George, advocated a comprehensive strategy for the nationalization of industries (Balogh 2009, 321). Moreover, not only did the progressives provide objective calculations and expertise militating for the general public interest and welfare of Americans, but they also became actively involved in the machinery of the administrative state. Roughly in the period 1880-1920, a lot of national associations cooperated directly with the federal government, as 'independent' agencies, to dismantle laissez-faire liberal practices and enterprises.

The emergence of welfare state in the 1930s, especially during the first two terms of President F. D. Roosevelt, was the ultimate consequence of progressive nationalism centered on the dogmas of administrative state and scientific management. In fact, the efficient and scientific administrative state was the champion and the general welfare was its glory. Nationalizing all sectors of public life became the adamant goal of the 'new liberals', welfare state nationalists and social-democrats. Through methods of surveillance, investigation and regulation, the expertly-conducted, interventionist and paternalist bureaucratic agencies of the administrative state could operate overarching social and economic control and engineering. The progressive ideologues and reformers equated science with efficiency (Taylor 2008, 306-313); they acknowledged scientific and political action as the very spirit of the age, and efficiency as its prime ethos. The doctrine of the administrative state was very influential among the new school of social-liberals, who added to the vocabulary of enlightened nationalism terms such as the "American way of life" and the "American Dream" (Alexander 1969).

The Messianic Nation: Americanism, anti-communism, and the paradigm of self-aggrandizing nationalism

At the end of the nationalist spectrum of grandeur and self-aggrandizement, there is an unshakeable belief in the noble and redeeming mission of one nation. Partly religious and partly resulting from the overall exaggeration of that nation's role in the world, messianic nationalism intersects the basic tenets of ethno-religious nationalism. Prompted by ignorant conformism to a misunderstood form of civil religion based on unquestioned innate innocence, messianism rests fundamentally on a "theological faith in the universal validity of a dogmatic… default mode of humanity" (Lieven 2004, 53). This general picture has perfectly represented the geopolitical portrait of the United States, especially from the beginning of the Cold War onward. At the core of this mystical self-confidence, there is a strong sentiment of national superiority doubled by the future projection of a special worldly mission. Seymour Martin Lipset, in his American Exceptionalism, derived this shared sentiment from the historical circumstances that had favored the United States' uniqueness in the world (Caldwell 2006, 143). On the other hand, the future trait of messianic nationalism stands for a permanently renewed promise regarding the realization of 'more perfect' human conditions. Contrary to the exhortations praising a past immovable national identity stemming from common origins, religion, language and history, American messianic nationalism descends "from an imagined future whose promise lay in transcending the past" (Doyle 2002, 21). As such, the portrayal of American messianic nationalism cannot avoid lucid criticism and skeptical disbelief. Accordingly, the forma mentis of messianic nationalism has to confront at least three basic objections: first, in regard to the ignition of self-righteous national extremism; second, concerning the promotion of misplaced geopolitical strategies, and third, the preservation of strenuous international relations with other states, including allies (Lieven 2004, 81-82).

No messianic nationalism could possibly be effective without its outer export. In other words, it becomes fruitful within an internationalist setting in which the messianic nation fulfills expansionist and imperialist duties. The story of a bright world future under the patronage of the United States has been prompted by the annexationist and protectionist missions assumed by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean Islands in the aftermath of the 1898 war against Spain. At the turn of the century, the British journalist William T. Stead was the first to coin the dictum "the Americanization of the world", in 1902. Until the glorious proclamation of the "American Century" (Luce 1941), there had been constant and widespread optimistic sentiments dominating the American elites in regard to their nation's civilizing and purposeful mission in the world, which might have worked as solid justifications for expansionism and imperialism (Beveridge 2008, 496-504). By and large, the expansionist military campaigns under the noble guise of Americanization started in 1890, when a large community of Sioux Native Americans was exterminated; the same type of approach, against 'savage peoples', was carried out in countries such as Puerto Rico and Philippines after the Spanish war (King 2005, 26-36). When endorsing European ethnic nationalism at the end of World War I, in his famous Fourteen Points Address, President Woodrow Wilson made one step further in the affirmation of propagandistic messianic nationalism: to make the "world safe for democracy" simply meant the export of American values according to the self-assured idealist mission and transformative zeal of a model concocted in a privileged and exceptional nation.

At the end of the Second World War, the doctrine of Americanism enriched the plethora of nationalist meanings. Two separate and markedly nationalist orientations appraised Americanism and pretended to fight for certain goals in order to defend it. On the one hand, a bunch of statesmen and political activists, such as Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, or Averell Harriman, turned into architects of nationalist globalism and exceptionalism (Fousek 2000, 11). On the other, a congressional committee whose brain was Senator Joseph McCarthy followed a path of intense domestic nationalism and pursued a non-compromising anti-communist campaign under the shield of the Cold War ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. While the first Americanist wing called for committed patriotism in support of shaping a new foreign policy direction, anti-communist nationalists launched an almost hysterical witch-hunting and demanded integral loyalty to the American nation. Their anti-communist propaganda bears striking resemblance to inter-war European nationalist elites in their combativeness to discredit socialism. In addition, what seemingly banded the two groups together was the subordination of their political actions to national security propaganda; in effect, the ratification of the National Security Act in 1947 provided protection for these nationalist impetuses and paved the way to the nationalization of federal bureaucracy and the creation of specialized institutions, such as the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. All these endeavors were called the 'Pearl Harbor effect' and illustrated the coordinated effort of domestic institutions and groups to design the American national grand strategy. If Roosevelt's administrative state subordinated national security to the economic national interest, the post-war nationalists precisely identified the security agenda with the supreme national interest (Stuart 2008, 8-24).

From the mid-1950s on, a steady conflict between the post-New Deal social-liberal nationalists and the first generations of right-wing nationalist neoconservatives has been dominant within the ideology of American nationalism. On one side, there were liberal interventionists defending isolationism, affirmative civil rights and economic interests as pervasively chief goals of US nationalism. On the other, adepts of laissez-faire and free markets liberalism amplified the issue of security interests and, consequently, advocated a more assertive role of the United States in international politics. It was precisely the foreign policy agenda that ignited the nationalist controversies during the Cold War era. For instance, American universities dominated by left-wing and moderate liberals denounced the 'national weakness' and the 'Vietnam guilt' as some of the most negative consequences of aggressive foreign policy and neo-imperialism. Their rivals, the neoconservatives, accused the liberal intelligentsia of decadence, shallowness and lack of patriotism and loyalty to the country (Lieven 2004, 28-29). This ideological state of belligerence has remained in place even after the end of the Soviet-American Cold War frictions. In fact, in the 1990s, one could notice a resurgence of the above-mentioned ideological dispute, with the neoconservatives playing the upper hand. In the context of globalization, the neoconservatives insisted, the United States should not diminish its strong assertive tone in foreign affairs; the chorus of global voices in a multi-polar world should be conducted by the United States' messianic timbre - expression of overconfident and self-aggrandizing nationalism. Opting for US assertive nationalism to the detriment of petty isolationism, the former Secretary of State in the 1990s, Madeleine Albright, convincingly decreed the international posture of the United States under the formula of 'indispensable nation'. This was the prevailing atmosphere surrounding the US foreign policy agenda when the tragic events of 9/11 happened at the turn of the 21st century. The aggressive and inflexible response of the US through the national security strategy of President George W. Bush urged for renewed reflection on the privileged destiny of the American nation. One perspective discerned between two basic types of national identification in those troubled times of confusion and utter emotionalism: thus, Americans themselves were entrapped between positive patriotism based on solidarity, active participation, pride and loyalty, and hyper-nationalism inspired by the Bush doctrine, centered upon intolerance, imperialism, militarism and muscular politics (Li and Brewer 2004, 727-728).

The 'post' incarnations of an ideology

Liah Greenfield's germane book on nationalism dismissed its ideological character and adopted an alternative approach by assimilating nationalism to a "style of thought", even though the author provided one of the most comprehensive definitions for whatever it might mean: nationalism "locates the source of individual identity within a people, which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity" (Greenfield 1992, 3-4). I think that each of Greenfield's four pillars of nationalism rather subverts the ideology and converts it in current 'post' reevaluations.

Firstly, the post-ethnic perspective on nationalism unties the confined meanings of individual ethnic identity in order to mirror the realities of a global and cosmopolitan world (Hollinger 1995). Paradoxically enough, in the case of the United States, foreign policy strategies have attempted to provide more conspicuous contours of American 'national individualism' in the forms of self-aggrandizement and assertiveness, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 events.

Secondly, the sovereignty of the people concept was recently reversed in order to become one of the central tenets of populist rhetoric. Recently identified with 'neo-sovereignty' (Spiro 2000), the post-national appropriation of sovereignty in the United States could be easily identified with Donald Trump's glorification of the 'American nation first' propaganda.

Thirdly, as the most radical repudiations of nationalism have instantiated, a lot of sub-national conflicts and separatist tendencies have ignited outright post-nationalism. In the United States, the 21st century 'neo-nationalist' upheavals of Bush and Trump have prevented the nation from facing sweeping manifestations of nationalist denials and striking regional loyalties.

Fourthly, the post-multicultural perspective on nationalism, according to which group distinctions are paramount and hierarchies and differentiations between groups should be erased through affirmative policies (King 2005, 167), dissolves the nationalist concept of collective solidarity in the United States into racial, social, class, community, and local crumbled solidarities.

Would it be the case that these 'post' assessments are just present-time occurrences of American nationalism's promising and future-oriented character?

5. PROGRESSIVISM

The ant and the elephant: on the progressive ideological endeavours

The American progressive movement was unique as a self-contained ideology underlining a subsequent political agenda. Nowadays, even if its core ideas and values are rather eccentric and obsolete, the spirit and reverberation of progressivism are far from being extinct. To call someone a progressive today means to recognize his/ her emancipating inclinations, reformist intentions and/ or affirmative enthusiasm. In the jargon of current ideological classifications, the progressive is identified with the left-wing liberal fighting for social equity, inclusiveness and non-discrimination, welfarism and policies of redistribution. According to a certain consideration pertaining to modern historical development, progressivism might be rated as the driving engine of American modernization, prompted by the post-Civil War Reconstruction prospects. According to a different reading, the beginnings of the progressive movement coincided with the widespread popular perception regarding the immorality and wrongdoings generated by the liberal civilization, or, in other words, with the point when the liberal ideas that had been constitutive for American consciousness and constitutional system revealed their limits. Paraphrasing one of the main theorists of progressivism, Walter Lippmann, I would say that the progressive mind was born out of weaknesses and limitations of American liberal political culture. Progressivism had the merit of testing the ideological consistency of liberalism and, on a different ground, of challenging the monopolizing characteristic of the two-party American political system.

Moreover, likewise the ideology and doctrine of liberalism, progressivism was both a corpus of scientific presuppositions and an indelible political practice. In its former instantiation, one has to deal with specific conceptual fundamentals that framed the ideology from a theoretical standpoint, while, in the latter, one can establish how much of these intellectual premises were incorporated in political agendas and decision-making processes and how those actions became effective. Arguably, progressive theories and their enforcement underwrite a systematic approach to politics of elephantine magnitude (Greenbaum 2000, 193): on the one hand, the progressive intellectual infrastructure unveiled a fantastic set of both lucid and preposterous ideas; on the other, political implementation went hand in hand with enthusiastic assumptions of the progressive intellectual creed and generated a comprehensive reform at all levels of public life. Within the ideological tenets of progressivism, one could detect both the ant and the elephant, in the colossal theoretical efforts and the overarching reform programs, respectively.

First and foremost, the progressive ideology emerged in the context of explosive industrial revolution and dominating laissez-faire mentality in the aftermath of the Reconstruction era. The beginnings of American progressivism revealed its fundamental conceptual underpinnings in close relation to the historical context that brought it into being (Geyer 1997, 36-37). Moreover, the progressive movement developed its own pragmatics (Stalnaker 1972, 387-388), plainly visible within the unparalleled set of reforms resulting from visceral ideological presuppositions postulated by progressive intellectuals. Fundamentally at variance with the mainstream liberal milieu, the progressive mindset was constitutively illiberal: considering the progressive propensity to advocate reforms by disregarding minimal liberal claims, one could legitimately ask how was it possible for an illiberal ideologue to positively reform the society he/ she was a member of, and, conversely, how could a reformer be associated to illiberal practices and mentalities? Answering these questions is tantamount to disclosing both the valuable achievements and the unsurpassable failures of the movement.

Progressivism was the product of its historical context as well: by and large, historians, economists, intellectuals, political scientists and pundits have termed the age between the 1880s and the early 1920s the 'Gilded Age' or the 'Progressive Era', depending on their perspectives upon the time in question. On the one hand, the 'Gilded Age' mythology unfolds its characteristic narrative ingredients: capitalism, rough individualism, big businesses, robust economy, industrialism, imperialism. On the other, the 'Progressive era' underlines reformism, welfarism, administration, expertise, pragmatism, moralism, positivism, collectivism. Both monikers have been idiosyncratically used to explain the mainstream development of American politics, economy and society at the turn of the twentieth century; in fact, they should be seen as distinct sides of the same coin, as both have become explanatory models for the unprecedented modernization and development of the United States.

Harassing the enemy: the progressive assault on laissez-faire liberalism, c. 1880s

The American progressive mindset emerged as a momentous antagonistic ideology to certain ideological trends of the 1870s and the 1880s. Economically, the progressive movement denounced the capitalist mythology, or the so-called "business mirage" which set the American society on the road to unscrupulous economic success under the spell of the laissez-faire liberal economic model and of a specific understanding of American exceptionalism. The progressives objected that corporatist economic strategies disenfranchised classical liberalism of free enterprise and private initiative principles (Greenbaum 2000, 4-5; Bogle 2005, xix-xx). Culturally and socially, the progressives turned against the tendentious interpretation of Herbert Spencer's social Darwinist philosophy which attempted to justify the natural survival of those who succeeded on the economic market. This doctrine denied both Benthamism and secular affirmative legislation, emphasising the idea of economic survival of the fittest with a view to strengthen the liberal laissez-faire principle. Thus, the ideas of social Darwinism worked in the service of industrialism and the success of American businesses, being appropriated to fit the ideological propaganda of the times (Hofstader 1955, 40-44; Hawkins 1997, 104-106). The panic of 1873 represented a point of crisis in American political history that urged for the opportunity of progressive response. Quite promptly, progressives called for the returning to Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian doctrine and the implementation of state interventionism in economy, emphasising on massive reforms of the legal framework in order to protect the less privileged social classes.

Despite the strong endorsement of industrial capitalism within American academic circles in the 1870s, the progressive movement adopted opposing intellectual strategies in favour of reformism and functionalism, including here literary realism and the pragmatic view in philosophy (Brown 2005, 6; Kloppenberg 1986, 3-4). In epistemology, progressives thought that pragmatic truth should obliterate the old conflict between idealism and empiricism; therefore, the progressive doctrine embraced the option for experiential truth in daily life to the detriment of both transcendental and experimental truth. In other words, the truth of lived experience was considered superior to rational truth or to a kind of truth validated by positive sciences. In ethics, instrumentalism rendered the distinction between intuitionism and utilitarianism irrelevant; this fact refers to approaching moral good from the standpoint of instrumental reason which regards morality as a commonly shared mode of behaviour, apart from normative austerity or the dogma of diverse private interests (Koons 2009, 46-91).

In history, the progressive project of New History writing attempted to be, in the language of the frontier thesis theorist, Frederick Jackson Turner, the most accurate representation of human life dynamics, a true "self-consciousness of humanity". A shift in meaning, from theory to diffuse continuities, and emphasis on the necessity of cooperation between history and geography or anthropology directed the progressive American historiography towards a new model of explanation taking into consideration the specificities of the US geographic space. This endeavour was characteristic not only for American progressive historiography, but, significantly, for French and German historiography as well. The new science of history aimed at replacing the official political historiography with a project based on a unifying interdisciplinary approach that should reflect the slow evolution of humanity in order to include cultural, economic and social perspectives (Breisach 1993, 21-28). Belief in progress became the justification for introducing the modern spirit in American historiography, epitomizing social and economic changes, reforms and modernisation, science and urbanisation, pragmatic instrumentalism and cooperative society, as models of historical explanation illustrating the optimistic progressive views (Breisach 1993, 110-114).

In politics, progressive reformism and political activism rendered futile the theoretical controversies between revolutionary socialism and laissez-faire liberalism. As such, the progressive doctrine denied the effectiveness of radical political options, putting forward the idea of emancipation and slow evolution through reforms, to the detriment of revolutionary socialist utopia and aggregate free market economy supported by the mainstream liberal ideology. The political views of progressivism included as well a revived concept of direct democracy in Rousseau's terms with a view to annihilate the concentration of wealth and power. According to the progressive logic, the concept of direct democracy could be viable by enhancing political participation and with massive assistance of the strong administrative government. The progressive imagery of the political also stressed upon the idea of supporting public communities, by advocating Gemeinschaft (organic community) to the detriment of Geselschaft (contractual society), in other words, by endorsing the idea of social responsibility that all citizens have to the detriment of contractual rationalism intrinsic to the liberal logic (Henrie 2004, 19). The social agenda of progressivism envisaged three major postulates. First, the progressive mindset defended culture of intellectual humanism to the detriment of the dominant liberal ideology of Lockean provenance and consequently emphasised on the concept of human rights versus the liberal dogma of economic property. Second, progressivism appraised social cohesion and commonwealth to the detriment of McAdoo's pluto-democracy which glorified the domination of money supervised by democratic regulations (Greenbaum 2000, 196). Third, the doctrine of progressivism constructed its reputation of being the forefather of social welfarism.

Ideologically, the progressives insisted for salient distinctions between their views and populism or specific varieties of socialism (i.e., Christian Socialism and Social Gospel), even if their stances on political, economic and social matters heavily intersected populist and socialist outlooks. In attempting to balance industrial capitalism and liberal democracy (Mattson 1998, 7), by putting forward the novel formula of the New Republic, the progressive doctrine endorsed statism and nationalism as politically more efficient in comparison to the constitutional principles of liberal state jurisdiction (Harrison 2004, 2). By and large, four ideological key terms were used as progressive explanatory models. Firstly, the ideological model of "organisational synthesis" referred to the need for government intervention on a growing scale in order to balance out the gap between the economic power of corporations and diverse smaller-scale interests that were active, but stifled at the macroeconomic level. According to this explanatory model, the progressive American government should intervene with a series of reforms meant to offset the disproportionate equilibrium of forces within the industrial American society. A referential academic article, The Emerging of Organisational Synthesis in Modern American History, postulated the progressive knowledge as a combination of historical thought and ideas borrowed from behavioural sciences (Galambos 1970, 279-290). The second model of "undifferentiated majority" pointed at wide-ranging popular protests and moral discontent against economic and political power of big businesses and against privileges and fragmentation of the American society at large. Benjamin De Witt's ideological manifesto The Progressive Movement rejuvenated the government by the people principle as future guiding organization of mass political parties to the detriment of the elitist principle of government by the few (De Witt 2006, 262-272), while Franklin Giddings's Democracy and Social Organisation endorsed the rational nature of public opinion and introduced the concept of "consciousness of kind", emphasising the salient majority role for the objective understanding of history and politics (Giddings 2006, 84-94). The model of "corporate liberal" was used to explain the adaptation of political culture to the context of rising corporate capitalism; it was supposed to highlight the ways in which the political sphere had undergone a change brought about by certain decisive influences of capitalist culture, and to demonstrate how big enterprises and corporations had influenced policy-making processes and government decisions. James Weinstein's book, The Corporate Ideal of the Liberal State, remains central to understanding both the cooperation between federal government and big businesses, and the responsibility of citizens to mitigate the unfair economic conditions imposed by the ideology of laissez-faire. Lastly, the explanatory model of "public interest" shed a light on the issue of various groups and lobbies seeking to apply pressure on government in order to maximize their influence and promote their interests (Harrison 2004, 6-9). Elisabeth Clemens' work, The People's Lobby: Organisational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the US, 1890-1925, and Herbert Croly's Progressive Democracy imagined effective mechanisms for promoting specific public interests, with a special focus on labour unions in this respect (Croly 2006a, 168-176).

In a nutshell, the progressive movement diagnosed Gilded Age capitalism as the mortal enemy of reforms and progress, so that its sages moved to find viable responses to the negative effects of trusts and to the discretionary accumulations of capital by big bosses. They not only thought that corporatism ruined competition and private enterprise in economy, but were also certain that plutocracy inhibited the development of middle-classes and repressed the poor. And yet, the compassionate progressive propaganda concealed deeper concerns and bombastic dreams.

Determination and self-centeredness: the progressive holistic reformism in the 1900s

First and foremost, the progressive obsession was related to realizing a revolution in political economy. For instance, one plainly consistent fact with the progressive and populist revolutionary approaches in economy pointed to the emergence of labor unions and riots (appraised by the progressive scheme) as spontaneous responses to monopolistic tendencies and savage capitalism of big businesses and bosses (defended by the Gilded Age schemata). To illustrate the importance of this conflicting evolution of the period in economy, it is enough to consider the fact that "from 1881 to 1905, American workers organized an average of four strikes per day, more than 36,000 in total" (Leonard 2016, 4)! Maintaining that progressivism aimed at comprehensively reconstructing liberalism and not dismantling it would be equivalent to proclaiming that the progressive ideology attempted to revive economic liberalism in the form of liberal nationalism (Milkis 1999, 10, 18-19).

The optimist and self-centered progressive experts were not only economists: in fact, the most distinguished of them married happily academic pedantry with bureaucratic duty (John R. Commons, Richard T. Ely, Irving Fisher, Arthur Holcombe, Jeremiah Jenks, Simon N. Patten, Henry R. Seager). The list of energetic progressive experts in the service of the administrative state included sociologists (Charles Horton Cooley, Charles R. Henderson, Edward A. Ross), social gospelers (Walter Rauschenbusch, Josiah Strong), journalists and intellectuals (Herbert Croly, Vernon Parrington, Benjamin DeWitt), jurists (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter), and even presidents and notable political activists (Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette). Even if certain dividing issues generated minor disputes and dissenting opinions among prominent members of the progressive movement, there was a large consensus regarding certain recognizable doctrinal traits and salient orientations. First, the progressive mindset opposed both liberal individualism and laissez-faire economy. Second, a peculiar type of nationalist impetus bumped into their strategic goals. Third, certain collective rights encompassed by the public good desideratum had to prevail over individual rights. Fourth, pragmatic efficiency and scientific management were envisaged as key tools of holistic reforms. Fifth, the progressive experts identified monopolies, trusts and big businesses as the most dangerous enemies of American society at large. Eventually, they almost prophetically anticipated the savior - the administrative state through specialized bureaucratic agencies.

But political economy alone could not match the hyperbolic aspirations of progressive ideologues; however, the new academic discipline of economics became instrumental for launching the expertise, the managerial efficiency and the scientific pretensions of the progressives. Despite noble aspirations, inclusive reforms and securing social ideals, carefully collected and wielded economic data served as key arguments for the progressive justification of racism, nativism, anti-immigration policies and regulation of labor. Furthermore, the progressives purported to advertise certain painstaking reforms by insisting that their arguments were non-speculative and scientifically valid, resulting from the objective calculations of outstanding experts militating for the general public interest and welfare of Americans. Therefore, the expert became the plenary figure of the time.

Designing the "fourth branch" (Leonard 2016, 42) of the American government - through independent, objective, scientific and expertise-guided bureaucratic agencies - became the central goal of progressive reformism coalescing and enclosing all visionary efforts and political actions. The crucial step of progressive ruminations was the all-encompassing reorganization of American politics, economy and society at the turn of the twentieth century: the bureaucratization of public life. In keeping with the slogan 'the end excuses means', the reformist over-determination of progressive strategists disclosed perplexities, paradoxes, inconsistencies and contradictions inherent to the processes of 'reform'. The progressive reformers went so far as to dismiss even the constitutional principle of separation of powers, declaring it "inefficient and obsolete" (Leonard 2016, 65); they anthropomorphically imagined the federal state as a "social organism" endowed with ultimate rationality and honest moralism. John Dewey's Democratic Ethics conceived democracy as a way of life and elaborated on the possibility of educating citizens according to enlightening principles of communitarian democracy. Dewey noticed the shortcomings of procedural mass democracy, endorsing instead the organicist view of democracy and the idea that democratic order represented an "ethical ideal of humanity" (Dewey 2006, 73-76; Dewey 1924, 19-27). At the apex of the progressive movement, in the field of political ideas, Herbert Croly's The Promise of the American Life attempted to reconcile the values of individualism with democratic communitarianism. In other words, Croly aspired to achieve Hamiltonian ends through Jeffersonian means; further on, in Progressive Democracy, he overcame eclecticism and eulogized the philosophy of pragmatism in James and Dewey (Kloppenberg 2010, 10).

The efficient and scientific administrative state was the champion and the general welfare was its glory. Through the methods of surveillance, investigation and regulation, the sanctified, expert-conducted, interventionist and paternalist bureaucratic agencies of the administrative state could operate both overarching social control and social engineering. Virtuous and enthusiastic reform plans became respectable due to the unquestionable pomposity of scientism. The progressive ideologues and reformers equated science with efficiency; they understood scientific and positive political action as the very spirit of the age and efficiency as being its ethos.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, scientific administration was, accordingly, the most appropriate action strategy. Purporting administration, not politics, "some American cities replaced mayors with city managers" (Leonard 2016, 64), and the very scientific experiment in administration was the state of Wisconsin, managerially organized in compliance with the most rigorous assumptions of the German scientific state and the welfare statism taught by German political economists in universities. Although eulogized for their rhetoric in defense of the 'forgotten man', the regulative, interventionist and managerial policies of the progressives were, in fact, substantially protectionist, not equalitarian. The movement of social gospel made one step forward, rejuvenating the American protestant spirit and pretending that the object of salvation in the modern world should be identified with society and the living environment, not with the individual soul.

The most compelling term of the progressive vocabulary was reform. More than a dogma and close to outright propaganda, the progressive obsession with ubiquitous reforms touched almost every area of public life. Politically, direct primaries, initiative referendum, recall of judicial decisions and direct election of senators should become means to enforce direct democracy. Better legislation and better government directed against political bosses and lobbyists were envisaged to dismantle savage capitalism. Furthermore, support for rural life and agricultural protectionism became constant references of progressive discourse (Bacon 2006, 2-4; Greenbaum 2000, 197; Milkis 1999, 7). In order to enforce direct democracy, the progressives committed themselves to encouragement of political participation. According to the progressive doctrine, participatory democracy implied responsibility and morality, improved education and sound public opinion, especially in John Dewey, James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard and Walter Lippmann. Public community referred to educated political inquiry and individual enlightenment in John Dewey and Herbert Croly (Croly 2006b, 19-25; Milkis 1999, 29). Reforms of traditional political parties were also indispensable: the creation of the Democratic Federation, composed of reformist democrats, and the recruitment of moderate republicans for the National Progressive Republican League, respectively, aimed at enhancing parties' profile for the attraction of progressive supporters. The new partisan factions were fully aware of strong opposition on the republican side because of  support for regulation of business, tariff revision, banking and political reform, while the democrats were cautious in regard to those dimensions of progressive reforms referring to nationalism, bureaucracy and government agencies.

Social reform was the backbone strategy of the progressive logic. Above all, persuasive rhetoric for women's rights, civil rights movement, settlement houses, universities, labour unions and labour rights became dominant in the progressive laboratory of projected improvements (Addams 2006, 78-84; Ely and Low 2006, 149-157; Patten 2006, 157-163; Perkins-Gilman 2006, 213-224). In addition, the progressive political agenda contained details regarding immigration restriction and prohibition.

In the economic field, Richard Ely and Simon Patten were two of the most reputable progressive economists who imagined economic progress by savings, investment, and efficiency (Greenbaum 2000, 3); their combativeness was mostly visible in their antitrust enmity, strong advocacy for small businesses, regulations, tax system, and administration. Apace with their fellows in government, the progressive economists stood for some memorable bills: the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 restricted the monopoly of railroads; the Sherman Act of 1890 curbed big businesses and favoured competition; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust decisions (e.g., the prosecution of J. P. Morgan Northern Securities Railroad Trust - 1902 and the Hepburn Act - 1906) imposed standards of corporate good behaviour and so did the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (Brands 2001, 11-12). The Hamiltonian principle of government activism should be effective in creating premises for fair competition, elimination of unfair practices, conservation of natural resources and support for fair wages and reasonable prices (Brands 2001, 14). Whilst Woodrow Wilson promoted moderate government decisionism through the New Freedom program, in the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt fully developed the ideology of the welfare state in the context of emergent liberal democracy. Eventually, the New Deal administrative reforms marked the climax of progressivism both as a promising ideology and as a political practice.

New scientific agencies concurred to the configuration of magnificent progressive plans: the old American Social Science Association (1865) was divided in the American Historical Association (1884), the American Economic Association (1885), the American Sociological Society (1905), and the American Political Science Association (1903) (Ely 2006, 41-45). Some of these institutions decisively contributed to the turn of social sciences towards positivism: the science of history, for instance, aimed at abandoning its mainstream narrative based on glorifying the American liberal civilization and exceptionalism and turned to a more pragmatic approach founded on quantitative research and positive development in the spirit of nationalist enlightenment. Moreover, the most influential progressive publication in the United States was founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann - The New Republic (1914) - in order to popularise the nervy progressive political agenda in contrast to the Jeffersonian-inspired type of progressivism proclaimed by Louis Brandeis in Harper's Weekly. Frederick Jackson Turner's emphasis on populist democracy and agrarian economism thwarted the ardour towards rough liberal individualism and corporate industrialism (Brown 2005, 196-197). In the glory days of progressivism, American historians were already aligned to the French and German ambitions for the academic reconstruction of epistemic principles in the new science of history. James Harvey Robinson's The New History (1912) acknowledged the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in the sense of understanding historical knowledge as a complex system, including conceptual intersections with anthropology, sociology and psychology. Charles Beard's work, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), insisted on the characteristic of antagonism as constitutive to the historical evolution of the United States, rather than understanding American history in consensualist terms. As such, American history should be conceived in terms of syncopated development, composed of conflicts between the Hamiltonian principles of government and the democratic popular rule, and/ or between the liberal individualism of economic elites and the rational control of economic enterprise (Brown 2005, 198-200).

Climax and decadence: the progressive excesses, relativism and exhaustion in the 1920s

The turning point in the development of progressive activism and ideological reformism was the presidential elections campaign of 1912 when the former Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who run for a second non-consecutive term on the 'Bull Moose' progressive ticket, was defeated by the progressive democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson. Interestingly enough, the progressives not only managed to coagulate sound ideological incentives around a third party platform, but were sufficiently eloquent as to inspire the Democratic Party's electoral agenda as well. Much of the animating progressive ideology in the first two decades of the twentieth century was absorbed within the two terms of democratic President Wilson at the White House, especially in regard to science of government. Consequently, 1912 could be understood both as the peak of the progressive ideological movement and as the beginning of its exhaustion and decline. That is the reason why the climax of progressive ripeness concomitantly settled the premises of its future decadence and (progressive - sic!) insignificance.

In the fully developed phase, the progressives moved to tempering their reformist energy by attempting to provide trustworthy scientific grounds to their acumen; accordingly, scientism was the defining signature of their tactic. First, they stressed upon the leading role of the new social sciences, which had the task of defining progress and providing certainties about America's future. In the hands of progressive ideologues, social sciences had to deflate the idealistic aura of progressive intellectualism. What for intellectuals meant the fortification of the democratic ideal through interconnectedness between progressive teachings and popular political education centred on public philosophy and civic dialogue (Croly 1914, 145), for progressive political ideologues, ideal democratic conditions could only be achieved through efficient administration and affirmative action under the supervision of the scientifically-guided and regulative state. Second, the mentors of the progressive movement insisted that the fundamental characteristic of progressivism was criticism of the Constitution. They supported the cultural concept of historical contingency to the detriment of idealist insistence on the unchanging nature of constitutional principles; in this sense, American progressivism was influenced by German historicism and Hegel's organicist idea of the state as a living being (Pestritto 2005, 3). Third, in the phase of decline, the progressives hesitantly embraced either the relativist or the Marxist orientation. While the relativist turn became more and more obvious within their pompous eclecticism and baffling indecisiveness concerning the contrived objectives which characterized their incipient drive, the Marxist undertones turned unequivocal not only because of their obsessive criticism towards liberal capitalism and rough individualism, but also because of the widespread perception regarding the amalgamation with some principles of the populist agenda at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, in an attempt to reform nationalism, there was a split within the progressive movement between the new nationalists led by Theodore Roosevelt and the New Freedom proselytes under the guidance of Wilson and Brandeis. They shared different views on politics, in the sense that the former faction insisted on social conservatism and centralised administration, while the latter emphasised the importance of outward-looking internationalism by advocating the causes of sovereignty and self-government. Additionally, this opposition prompted the next quarter of a century's divide between nationalist isolationists and liberal internationalists.

Any dispassionate analysis of progressive thinking and reformism should acknowledge certain paradoxes, inconsistencies and even contradictions. In line with the present approach of progressive ideology, two of them are striking examples. First, attempting a comprehensive reform of the American public life at the turn of the twentieth century, the progressives denounced both socialism and plutocracy, but their urge on bureaucratization, regulation, control, surveillance and efficient business-like management of all sectors of public life transformed them into both socialists and plutocrats. Second, if Benjamin Parke DeWitt, one of the most important ideologues of the movement, correctly articulated the ultimate three goals of progressivism (i.e., cutting down government corruption, democratizing government and increasing the federal government's interference in economy), then "the realization of any one progressive goal worked to undermine the other two" (Leonard 2016, 49). More strikingly, one of the most paradoxical figures of the movement, and the most notorious as well, was that of President Woodrow Wilson. Widely appraised by scholars and the public alike as championing liberal internationalism, popular sovereignty and world peace, Wilson's writings, speeches and initiatives unveil the typical figure of the illiberal reformer. Repudiating natural individual rights, defending segregation laws, defying the constitutional principle of checks-and-balances (Wilson 1908, 16, 56), and supporting anti-immigration policies and racist considerations (Wilson 1903, 212-213), the democratic president epitomized the typology of the ambivalent and versatile personage of the movement.

Paradoxes, inconsistencies and contradictions were significant marks of progressive duplicity and relativism. Despite the progressive propaganda for inclusiveness and equalizing conditions, exclusions were in fact the undisclosed substratum of their ruminations, through the use of pseudo-scientific propaganda and derailed arguments. Immigrants, women and the disabled were those excluded with predilection from the progressives' grandiose society daydream. Their justificatory arguments for exclusions were extracted from the so-called scientific discourses of heredity (Darwinism, eugenics and race science). From the corpus of Darwinist theories, only evolution and common descent conveniently matched the progressive ideological thinking. The most problematic concept in Darwin, natural selection, was considered inconsistent with the progressive dogmas of scientism and efficiency, and rather specific to the logic of free market liberal capitalism which had traditionally endorsed the dogma of 'the survival of the fittest'. While the concept of evolution mirrored the progressive historical theories on modernization and emancipation, and the concept of common ancestry served as a fine ideological justification for the progressive commitment to racist discourses on heredity, the Darwinist idea of natural selection contrasted their pleas for interventionist and regulatory actions, so that - consistently with the progressive views - only artificial or social selection was envisaged to eliminate accidents and undesirable outcomes in economy and society.

Eugenics was a central pillar of progressive social reform and the very method of implementing artificial selection: breeding, or excluding the unfit from further procreation, should be effectively carried out through "scientific investigation and regulation of marriage, reproduction, immigration and labor" (Leonard 2016, 109). In other words, eugenics was supposed to contribute to the intelligent management of heredity, first and foremost by identifying and solving the problems of race degeneration, suicide and inferiority. In this respect, the progressive arguments were delusive and their actions hilarious: for instance, "they staged 'fitter family' and 'better baby' competitions at state agricultural fairs nationwide" (Leonard 2016, 113). Both race science and eugenics were used as rationale for the restriction of immigration and the protection of nativism. Whilst nativism was about the preservation of Anglo-Saxonism in order to conserve racial purity, immigration control was one of the most obsessive tenets of the progressive mindset. Once again, baffling arguments and twisting policies exaggerated the immigration problem: to exemplify, one pundit and social gospeler of the movement argued that industrial capitalism was kept alive because of southern and eastern Europeans' poor working standards which, furthermore, dispirited the Anglo-American aspirations for equalitarianism and democratization of social life (Rauschenbusch 1907, 275). Several congressional laws restricted and barred various categories of immigrants, alongside anarchists, polygamists and epileptics, while "The Expatriation Act of 1907 required American women who married foreigners to surrender their US citizenship" (Leonard 2016, 142-143)!

Another neurotic stance of American progressivism was related to answering the labor question. One of the cornerstones of progressive reformism, the regulation of labor became consistent with establishing minimum wages, fixing maximum working hours per day, arbitrating wage disputes, setting certain safety criteria, and, last but not least, reducing unemployment and marginalizing the unemployable. The complexity of the labor question was fundamentally grounded on two ideological premises: the reconstruction of the labor theory of value and the establishment of principles and criteria for both employment and unemployment. Firstly, the progressives rejected the liberal marginal-product theory of wages according to which workers' wages resulted from the value of the product and enthusiastically adopted the living-standard theory of wages, robustly socialist in spirit, according to which wages should cover a minimum family set of needs. Then, they established the postulates guiding labor policies through the 'family-wage' argument (i.e., the living needs of a family should be covered by the wage of the family man) and the 'mothers-of-the-race' conundrum (i.e., the exclusion of women from the labor market in order to protect motherhood and improve heredity) (Leonard 2016, 173-182).

Decadence and relativism characterized the ideological struggles of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the most representative historians of the movement, Carl Becker and Charles Beard, attempted to save the valuable and resurrect the wreckage. The confident opposition towards mainstream ideological narratives which accredited the pre-eminence of the liberal civilization model of explanation for the overall development of the United States gradually faded away, in order to leave room for puzzling relativism. It was precisely this intellectual posture that allowed progressive historians to justify and ascertain different and, more often than not, diverging interpretations of what progress meant at the beginning of twentieth century America (Breisach 1993, 165-214). The two-volume monumental work by Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1927), registered the goals of progressive history, in the sense that the association between political reforms and social emancipation in the United States was explained in terms of anti-capitalist economic development. Moreover, the American society was unmistakably depicted by means of jarring disparities between agrarian forces and industrial bourgeoisie. Beards' work included the idea that government should intervene in order to mitigate this conflict: although industrial capitalism eventually led to abolition of slavery in the South, the capitalist order in its turn should have been abolished by the new progressive aspirations at the turn of the twentieth century. The idealist and relativist president of the American Historical Association addressed both the progress of American society and the "refinement of knowledge" (Becker 1931, 221-236). Through different lenses, the progressive icon of cultural and literary criticism, Vernon Parrington, unhesitatingly identified the progressives as liberals, alongside Jeffersonians, Jacksonians and Brianites, and the "robber barons" (i.e., big corporate bosses) as conservatives, Puritans and federalists. All these contrivances reveal utter relativism doubled by cutting excessiveness.

As for the possibility of reviving the progressive spirit, especially left-wing liberal academics have stressed upon the idea of reinforcing the democratic stimuli as the very catalyst of a new progressivism, superior to the managerial agenda of the conservatives and the social democratic programme of the Left in Europe (Unger 1998, 41-42, 275). Until then, probably all the afore-mentioned paradoxes, inconsistencies and contradictions would continue to divide the progressive legacy: "Those who admired the progressives ignored or trivialized the reprehensible and wrote lives of the saints. Those who disliked the progressives ignored or trivialized the admirable and wrote lives of the proto-fascists" (Leonard 2016, 189).

6. DEMOCRACY

The democratic breed of exceptionalism in the United States

Since its stimulating use by the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in his monumental work Democracy in America, the epithet "exceptional" has come to encompass a plethora of meanings and terminological denominations. Originally, the comprehensive Tocquevillian overview of the political, social, cultural, and economic conditions in the New World pointed at limited government, the situation of the Americans, and the social state, as realities possessing an exceptional character (Tocqueville 2002, 133, 518). Later, the American exceptionalism denomination has become much too protean by appropriating many intellectual and suggestive references to the privileged historical positioning of the United States, which have cumulatively shifted from classical meanings to the most recent conceptual and contextual usages. Classical paradigms of American exceptionalism include, but are not limited to, "the city upon a hill" metaphor (John Winthrop), "the new man" reference to the New World inhabitants' prejudices and manners (Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur), the "empire of liberty" (Thomas Jefferson), the original social compact and "combination" (John Quincy Adams), the "Manifest Destiny" doctrine (John L. O'Sullivan) and its corollary in the frontier thesis (Frederick J. Turner), the "last, best hope of earth" optimistic assertion about the United States' historical progress (Abraham Lincoln), the self-made man/ woman mythologies of success (Horatio Alger), the "New Colossus" symbol for immigrants (Emma Lazarus), etc.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, when the United States of America acquired world-power status and prominence, the symbolical and mythological fascination with the aura of American exceptionalism has prompted political leaders, intellectuals and promoters/ defenders of American secular values to reiterate it for whatever reasons, purposes and exaltations they might have had. It is not by accident that terms like "Americanism" and "Americanization" emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, enhancing and dilating the classical references to American exceptionalism. Suffice it to say that Woodrow Wilson's liberal internationalism reiterated the Jeffersonian "empire of liberty" epithet; among other recurrent appraisals, "the uniqueness of American experience" postulate (Lerner 1957, 484), the "American democracy as a way of life" ethos (Dewey 2001, 91), and/ or the American material success and opportunity thesis (Potter 1954, 91-94) amplified what some classical American exceptionalist references stood for. Perry Miller (1953, 53) used his famous "errand into the wilderness" narrative in order to expand the Manifest Destiny idea, and Ronald Reagan tried to revive the American spirit by pointing at the first original symbol of American Exceptionalism, the Winthropian sermon of "the city upon a hill".

Most recent and contemporary approaches of American exceptionalism were rather critical (in both moderate and radical fashions) and made room for disenchantment and even mockery (Kane 2006, 49; Hart 2004, 45); on the other hand, some defenders and adepts of the suggestive force and potential resources characteristic to ideologies and driving myths in general are still confident about the influential value of American exceptionalism in the future (Foley 2007, 378-379). More recently, critics and detractors argued that some unfortunate and dogmatic interpretations of the classical creed of American exceptionalism paved the way to imperialism, unilateralism, aggressiveness and assertiveness, exemptionalism and discretionary use of power especially in foreign affairs (Bacevich 2002, 124).

My conjecture and argument is that when something becomes ubiquitous and encapsulates a variety of contextual meanings and collateral references, it ends in pervasive relativism, manipulative distortion and inconsistent vocabulary. Accordingly, I think that the imprecision, the speculative nature and, ultimately, the irrationalism denounced by present-day criticism of the ideology of American exceptionalism could be thwarted by precisely indicating what has been perennial and substantive along the multifaceted historical usages of the concept. In other words, it is consequential to provide necessary and sufficient arguments in defense of certain conceptual contents of American exceptionalism, beyond mythic, dogmatic and interested renderings. The development of democratic mentalities and stimuli in the United States of America could be expressive about the essential nature of exceptionalism, if satisfying the following three necessary conditions: firstly, the fundamental democratic characteristic of American exceptionalism needs sound justificatory historical arguments; secondly, the exceptional character of democracy in the United States should be tantamount to explaining its influential role in shaping the hallmark of world political cultures starting with the end of the eighteenth century; thirdly, and probably more instructive, the presupposition about the resourcefulness and practical future relevance of American democratic exceptionalism should be supported by both relevant tests of its effective applicability and convincing explanations on its prospective unraveling role in improving a large variety of shortcomings and contradictions specific to contemporary global democracies. If American democratic exceptionalism is supposed to have been pervasive and expected to prevail, then it has to resist both its past historical inconsistencies and presumable tests of present and future sufficiency. The scope of the present chapter is limited to mapping the exceptional fulfillments of American democracy - alongside with some of its most baffling contradictions - since the end of the eighteenth century until our present times, leaving unanswered, and yet provocative, the problem of its relevant instrumentality for the future.

Conceptualizing democratic exceptionalism in the United States

Paraphrasing one famous statement of Hegel, I would say that the postulation of the American exceptionalism thesis in the form of democratic exceptionalism is tantamount to asserting that the United States' historical development has been remarkably characterized by the progress of democratic idea(l)s, institutions and practices. According to this presupposition, the thesis to be examined is consistent with following (and arguing for) the gradual accumulations of democratic mentalities and beliefs and their incorporation into democratic practices and institutions. The historical itinerary of democratic exceptionalism in the United States of America is consistent with the steady democratization conditions of the American society and with the progress of rationality in the service of a "more perfect" American democracy.

Precisely the idea of perfectibility regarding the various momentary phases of democratic evolution in the United States makes room for inquiring the development of certain democratic phenomena in their temporal succession. That is to say that the historical occurrences of democratic exceptionalism reveal both certain achievements and shortcomings, and the synthesis between 'the achieved' and 'the imperfect' stands as the precondition for further improvements. Conceptualizing temporary crises and future promises could be explanatory for the constant reinvigoration of the democratic ethos that has been saturating the exceptional status of democracy in the United States. In other words, what has been controversial about various instantiations of the democratic ideology in the United States not only fueled ideological debates, but also pushed forward the epos of democracy towards momentous corrections and improvements. In the end, the exceptional character of the story of American democracy not only stems from notable fulfillments, but also from its internal contradictions, generative of ameliorating approaches.

In keeping with my inquiry into the development of democratic exceptionalism, I have divided the narrative in two main blocks. The first part of the master narrative starts with the republican founding model and ends in the age of the reconstruction period following the Civil War. The study of the past historical evolution of democratic exceptionalism in the United States between the 1780s and the 1870s illustrates how the first three paradigmatic moments of democratic development (i.e., popular democracy, nationalist democracy, and equalitarian democracy) had been expressions of what I would term endogenous democratic exceptionalism. Marking the climax of internally-oriented developments of democratic exceptionalism in the United States and preparing for future expanding versions, the transitory moment of progressive democracy represented a turning point for the emergence of other five historical phases (i.e., cosmopolitan democracy, social democracy, open society democracy, global democracy and neo-sovereignty democracy), which highlighted the outer orientation and incidence of American democratic exceptionalism, or what I would designate as exogenous democratic exceptionalism.

Endogenous democratic exceptionalism: popular, nationalist, and egalitarian democracy in the United States

Endogenous democratic exceptionalism, roughly in the period between the 1780s and the 1870s, encompasses the democratic progress of ideas and practices within about one century in the United States, revealing - according to the algorithmic hypothesis of democratic growth - three paradigmatic moments. The unfolding of the first three moments reveals the fact that the democratic historical evolution of ideas and policies had a preeminently domestic impact, in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers and their followers' preoccupation for stabilizing and consolidating the early republican arrangements.

The first step characterizing the development of democratic American exceptionalism refers to both hesitations and determination of the Founding Fathers at the end of the eighteenth century regarding the establishment of a new secular republic. The secularization of power and politics was designed in the formula of popular democracy: it was popular in nature by abolishment of the heredity principle of access to political power, and democratic by design, that is, by the establishment of electoral procedures in the original project of the federal constitution. Republican federalism was envisaged as auspicious for the democratization of public life within the project of a small union of states prone to renouncing their isolated and selfish interests and promoting the common good in public affairs. Acknowledging the fragility of former colonies under the Articles of Confederation and possible future frailties, the framers thought of erecting a form of "protective republic" instead of the classical model endorsing the importance of civic virtues in society (Held 2008, 46-47). The ideas of popular and representative government, on the one hand, and public responsibility and accountability, on the other, nurtured the first democratic institutional arrangements in the United States. In short, the principles of popular sovereignty and republicanism were the first basic marks of democratic exceptionalism in the New World.

Moreover, other three political incentives galvanized the emergence of democratic exceptionalism in the United States: the democratic compromising and negotiation procedures in the process of ratification of the Constitution (e.g., the Connecticut Compromise), reference to the freedoms of expression, assembly and petition in the first amendment, and the limitation of express powers granted to the federal government in the tenth amendment. The principle of constitutionalism substantiated popular government to the detriment of divine right legitimacy (Skinner 1992, 57), guaranteeing separation and control of political branches and leaving room for adjusting probable inadequacies of the original text of the Constitution in confronting future challenges. The complementary text of the Bill of Rights not only perfected the original seven articles of the Constitution, but also established the quasi-democratic principle of amending the original document when salient conjunctures would demand it. All of the above-mentioned provisions represented undeniable democratic achievements.

Hesitations were also ingrained in the incipient project of American democracy: expressing their reservations towards the majority principle (Madison called it "the tyranny of majority"), therefore restricting voting rights, and, more contradictorily, preserving the institution of slavery, the Founding Fathers did not achieve a radical rebuttal of the old political mentalities of Europe. By and large, the late eighteenth century development of democratic exceptionalism uncertainly vacillated between defending the individualist principle of liberty and promoting the democratic principle of equality (Gunnell 2004, 51-52); in retrospect, all democratic developments in the United States avowed their exceptional character by attempting to cope with this intractable tension.

Further democratic accomplishments in the United States took place in the Jacksonian era. The elections of 1828 marked a decisive transitional move towards the present-day understanding of democratic proceduralism and political participation: the distillation of ideological options and of political parties' platforms (since then, the Democratic and the Republican Party, respectively) (Bibby 1996, 26; John 2003, 50-84), the first political campaigns and propaganda in the modern sense, the enlargement of the electoral pool in order to include more diverse social classes of white men voters, and Andrew Jackson's demagogic defense of popular government were, doubtless, strong democratic commitments. The insistence to strictly considering the will of the people transformed Andrew Jackson's figure into the first notorious populist in modern history, whilst his overall political rhetoric and demands for mass participation led to the consolidation of participative democracy in the United States. President Andrew Jackson's views on decentralizing federal policies, mostly visible in his endorsement of the Nullification Doctrine and on the issue of reforming the federal banking system (Atkins 2001, 20), did not contrast his ethnic type of nationalism (Foley 2007, 375-376).

In my view, competing nationalist doctrines characterized both the democratic achievements and the controversies of the Jacksonian age - beyond the important acquisitions in regard to participative democracy - and this is the very reason why I would characterize the historical evolution of democratic exceptionalism in the United States as markedly nationalist. For Jackson and supporters of expurgation nationalism, democratic progress and further consolidation of democratic processes could be possible only if preserving and defending the inbred character of colonial heritage and mindset, that is, a homogenous spirit regarding commonly shared beliefs regarding the connate American political culture, non-inclusive of Native Americans. But the nationalist democracy moment was not limited to such cleansing options: alternatively, John C. Calhoun's war nationalism earlier epitomized by the Monroe Doctrine, Henry Clay's liberal nationalism grounded on expanding the territorial infrastructure of the federal union, and/ or John Quincy Adams's refined version based on education contrasted the president's phylogenetic approach (Sauers 2010, 11-19). Starting in the 1830s and enduring until the Civil War, one salient - albeit controversial and divisive - trait of democratization had been the pervasive fragmentation of political life in the United States which finally dissolved the naïve nationalist passions. Certainly, the dissolution of the party system in the United States in the decades preceding the Civil War mirrored the pulverization of political public options (Ashworth 2001, 33-46; McCormick 1996, 15). Furthermore, sectionalist politics of the age was augmented by the disruptive Missouri Compromise of 1820 and culminated with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which put an end to utopian nationalist views and brought about the first major crisis of democratic exceptionalism in the United States.

Thus, alongside other plausible explanations, the crisis of nationalism and the collapse of the union have been tackled by precisely invoking the inflated and widespread democratic mentalities during the Jacksonian age, the dismantling of the two-party system, and the distortion of the original republican creed (Holt 1978, 230-240). One could argue that diffuse democratic passions troubled the fragile political context of the time, so that, in order to cope with the profound general crisis of American politics and society during the Civil War era, democratic exceptionalism had to acquire new meanings and fresh adaptations, in the abolitionist, emancipating and egalitarian political agendas which pushed forward the progress of democratic exceptionalism. Some historians and political scientists argued that the unprecedented democratic impetuses in the United States constituted major impediments for the coherence and stability of the reconstruction period as well. On the one hand, the farfetched conception of the equalitarian ideal in the glorious age of civil rights - 1865-1870 - marking the ratification of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution did not mirror the political arrangements and practices of the time. On the other, the excessive democratization of political life slowed down and complicated political reconstruction, because of weak leadership, anarchic tendencies and compromising deficit (Burton 2001, 49-50).

Egalitarian democratic exceptionalism of the Civil war era was ideologically promoted by three categories of militants: heterogeneous groups of romantic and intellectual abolitionists of the 1840s and beyond, crying out for the liberation of slaves in the name of the liberty ideal (Hume 1905, 15-25), fortuitous associations of politicians and movement activists, calling themselves "emancipationists" (Mitchell 2007, 199), in their concurring efforts of dismantling the ancient institution of slavery and paving the way for modernization, and a bunch of utopian socialist and egalitarian 'whips' who - for both economic and social reasons - aspired to an overarching reform of class and working conditions in the United States (Montgomery 1993, 37-38). Unfortunately, incomplete and shallow democratic egalitarianism superseded the rather noble, albeit quixotic, aspirations of the age: the abolitionist ideals became intoxicated by segregation politics and racial discrimination, the indeterminate doctrine of emancipation was supplanted by pseudo-scientific theories of bureaucratic management and paternalism, and the ebullient desiderate of equality ended in pervasive economic conflicts and civic unrest. These were the most intricate tasks to be tackled in the context of one of the most controversial and self-contradictory periods in the democratic adventure of democracy in the United States, the progressive age.

Bridging the breach: the progressive caesura and transition to outward-looking democratic exceptionalism

The progressive moment in the historical evolution of democratic exceptionalism in the United States epitomized the inherent contradictions and paradoxical nature specific to any transition in general. Crucial transformations in all sectors of American public life, the post-Reconstruction promises, economic boom, massive urbanization, accelerated industrialization and other phenomena prompted unprecedented and comprehensive political, social and economic reforms. Along the way, the democratic ethos and democratization processes have been severely affected by certain venturesome political agendas and policy initiatives, turbulent changes and hasty ideological enthusiasm. For those familiar enough with the mental grasp of the progressives, the phrase progressive democracy itself might have baffling and dissonant overtones, for it contrastingly conjoined bureaucratization, regulation, control, surveillance and efficient business-like management with inclusiveness, participatory and equalizing-like conditions and mechanisms of democratic reforms.

Parenthetically, the democratic tumult at home was amplified by the imperialist turnover in foreign policy in the aftermath of the 1898 war against Spain. The old protective republicanism of the Founding Fathers expanded to domineering-type of expansionist, protectionist and annexationist actions abroad, on the area of the American continent and the Caribbean states. The endogenous characteristics of policies and political actions directed towards conquering Western territories (i.e., Manifest Destiny) started to be replaced by exogenous goals and strategies. In context, the United States have embraced, slowly but firmly, the approach of democratic messianism in the aftermath of the first imperialist endeavors. Last but not least, the presupposition that the United States' dominance could bring about gradual democratizations and modernizations on the American continent has transformed the rather isolationist 1823 Monroe Doctrine into a more assertive engagement, plainly visible in Theodore Roosevelt's Corollary to the above-mentioned doctrine of 1904.

The most antagonistic political forces of the period (i.e., 1870s-1910s) were the industrialists and imperialists, on one side, and the progressives and populists, on the other. Industrialists and imperialists pushed the mid-nineteenth century doctrine of endogenous nationalist expansionism beyond its limits: they generally stood for massive investments, enhancing the financial and banking system, modernization, education and foreign market expansionism. Their progressive and populist rivals harshly criticized the corporatist, monopolistic and plutocratic approaches in the name of equalizing democratic opportunities and moved to enforce an encompassing program of centralized and paternalistic reforms grounded on federal government's pseudo-scientific management and organization which were answerable for pragmatic efficiency. According to progressive views, no solid democratic achievement could be possible without the involvement of the protective and judicious administrative state. Populists represented the retrograde, traditionalist and agrarian opposition to cruel industrialization and obstinate modernization: some of them positively accomplished seminal cultural criticism of the modernization evils, while others remained merely nostalgic towards the old Jeffersonian ideal of agrarian America and stigmatized centralism and nationalism in the name of local forms of direct democracy (Wiebe 1967, 84).

Ideologically, the Gilded Age liberal realities of big businesses, monopolies, big money and corporatism counterbalances the progressive and populist activism associated to extensive public reforms and purportedly democratic practices (e.g., anti-trust policies, protectionism, anti-monopoly reforms, administrative state, social movements and riots, scientific bureaucracy). Despite the constant demand of both progressives and populists for massive democratic reforms and responsibility of civil service, some critics contended that the exhilarating democratic spirit was the prevailing ideological ethos of the time (Lippmann 1925, 39). Others dismissed the durable impact of populist and progressive efforts: if populism eventually dissolved into a modest variety of utopian socialism with no significant influence whatsoever in the 1920s (Brown 2005, 42-45), the movement of progressivism succumbed to a version of social liberalism in the late 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. But what probably stands out as the most intriguing paradox of progressive democratic reformism is referential to the fascist-type of discriminatory politics. Multifarious policies of exclusion and extensive government interventionism obscured popular democratic aspirations, so that the progressive age had not fully mirrored the American democratic zeal in the twentieth century.

From self-confidence to cynicism: facets of exogenous democratic exceptionalism in the United States

Roughly in the period between the 1870s and the 1920s, the story of democratic exceptionalism in the United States had been overwhelmingly characterized by the confrontation between the more and more widespread and inclusive tendencies towards affirming the positive rights deduced from the democratic ethos of the time, on the one side, and the capitalist model of economic development in the hostile circumstances of centralization and overtly bureaucratic procedures of federal government in coping with the rapid modernization of the time, on the other. Accordingly, democratization processes merely revealed the masses' opposition to both liberal corporatism which stood for the ferocious competition between big businesses, rough individualism and political leverage, and governmental regulation and control, bureaucratization, political corruption, and interest groups and lobbies. In a sense, attempting to conceal the severe democratic turmoil at home, the United States moved towards disseminating democratic exceptionalism worldwide, in compliance with Woodrow Wilson's most famous dictum of "making the world safe for democracy". In other words, from the United States' involvement in the First World War until the 1960s, the substantial magnitude of the democratic exceptionalism narrative could be tested within the international milieu, marking in this way the sturdy shift from endogenous/ internal concerns towards exogenous/ externalist endeavors.

Its first moment, coincident with the Wilsonian era and the economic prosperity of the "roaring twenties", epitomized the post-war impetuses towards liberal internationalism and democratic cosmopolitanism inspired by the famous Fourteen Points program of president Wilson and directed towards maintaining a durable peace in the aftermath of a catastrophic war. The outstanding principle of cosmopolitan democracy endorsed at the 1919 Paris conference by Woodrow Wilson was a more sophisticated doctrine of popular sovereignty in the formula of the self-determination of peoples (Archibugi 2008, 228-230). At the core of the Wilsonian initiative was the idea that the future of world peace would be dependent upon expanding processes of democratization worldwide through international cooperation and mutual compromise which were expected to diminish the probability of future outright conflicts. President Wilson's idealistic enthusiasm for the spread of universalistic values impeded him to foresee the disastrous consequences of exacerbated nationalisms stemming from the erroneous understanding of the self-determination principle which eventually conduced to the collapse of the League of Nations and world democracy altogether. In addition, one could specify the meaning of cosmopolitan democracy in the context of post-First World War international arrangements as consistently equivalent with the beginnings of liberal democracy, democracy being about affirmative action in respect to certain basic rights and liberties, and liberalism overseeing compliance with "the rules of political competition and sharing power" (Chan 2004, 58). The Wilsonian version of cosmopolitan democratic exceptionalism as consistent with the international proliferation of liberal democracies ripened during the Cold War period.

The second moment of exogenous democratic exceptionalism had stretched against a tumultuous period in world history, from the interwar period of the late 1920s and the unfortunate events of the 1929 Stock Market Crash to the late 1930s and the beginning of the Second World War. Both the benefits and the failures of democratic processes in the United States have been usually associated to the New Deal era and its reforms. The ideology of the welfare state was largely shaped by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and its consequences, and originated in the attempts of deriving the principles of popular democratic government from massive social reforms, so that the proper designation for Roosevelt's welfare policies should be social democracy. At this point, it is important to understand how - paradoxically - was it possible for some notable protectionist social reforms to be implemented in the context of large-scale political decisionism especially during Roosevelt's administrations, and how they impacted upon the consolidation of civil and social rights political culture in the United States to the detriment of the individualistic ethos characterizing the mainstream liberal ideology. In other words, is it possible to postulate that the growth of democratic popular enthusiasm decisively impacted upon the reconstruction of the liberal core doctrine, so that the principled controversy between liberty and equality could be absorbed by the doctrine of social democracy? Or, conversely, could it be the case that the social character of large-scale democratic reforms enforced through governmental interventionism put an end to the classical liberal core? Answering these questions reveal not only the reconstruction of the ideology of democratic exceptionalism in the United States, but also the turndown of liberal individualism in Europe, under the over-encompassing command, control and paternalistic stances of social and nationalist-democratic mass political regimes. The welfare state principle guiding the interwar social democracies in the transatlantic world was not only bolstered by the post-1929 vilification of capitalist prerequisites, but also incorporated the inherent claim that true liberal values could only be defended by central governments' efficient administration and wise management of public interests and rights. The spirit of democratic exceptionalism in the Roosevelt era embraced the regulative and administrative principles and policies of the welfare state, by overturning the ethos of liberal democracy grounded on the preservation of individualism and negative rights. According to the dominant ideological tenets of the time, the experiment in social democracy was particularly exceptional due to the consolidation of social and civic traits of democracy through discharge of positive rights and affirmative action of the centralized government (Brenkman 2007, 140).

Partly resulting from the collapse of European Nazi and fascist 'mass democracies' at the end of the Second World War, and partly under the impact of fierce criticism of centralization and bureaucratization covering all sectors of public life at home (Nash 2008, 2), American democratic exceptionalism returned to a more liberal orientation, extolling pluralist values and rehabilitating individualism. Purporting to confront totalitarian societies and rebuke the ideology of Soviet communism, the US democratic exceptionalism boosted the desideratum of open societies and urged for the dissemination of authentic democratic policies and practices worldwide. Later on, anticipated by the crucial 1954 Supreme Court decision in the famous Brown v. Board of Education which virtually prohibited racial segregation in the school system, and the Great Society project of the 1960s, the advancement of democratic exceptionalism in the United States reached momentum due to the civil rights movement agenda and the decisive civil rights legislation of the 1960s. These notable achievements took place in the Cold War context of containment, deterrence, détente and rapprochement geopolitical strategies, opposing totalitarian and oppressed social systems to the American efforts of disseminating democratic values worldwide.

Until the end of the 1980s, which marked the definitive collapse of the Soviet bloc, the remarkable progress of American democratic processes had taken place in circumstances of far-reaching geopolitical frictions and this is the reason why I would assess democratic exceptionalism as exogenously oriented. Ideologically, the professionalized approach of international politics guided by pragmatic flexibility and geopolitical strategies (Mayers 1988, 220), and the assertion of the American "vital center" approach based on consensualism and pluralism (Schlesinger Jr. 1949, 170) plainly characterized democratic exceptionalism during the Cold War period. Unfortunately, the excesses of McCarthyst red scare propaganda in the United States roughly in the period 1947-1957 contravened the democratic principle of free choice regarding political sympathies and partisan affiliations.

Exogenous democratic exceptionalism in the last decade of the twentieth century pointed at the United States' efforts to promote the ideology of global democracy. At the end of the ideological confrontation between the rhetoric of liberal democracy and totalitarianism, there was one glorious winner - the United States and the optimistic idea of future global societies based on the capabilities of new technologies. Ideologically, the idea of global democracy was expected to function as a successful substitute for post-industrial and postmodern societies. The end of history thesis (Fukuyama 1992, xiii) and/ or the post-ideological world were optimistic ruminations decreeing the end of the atomic era. The new post-colonial arrangements, reformism and the end of dictatorships leading to political disorientation in several Central and Eastern European states after 1990 prompted the United States' actions and strategies in order to enforce rapid democratic transitions with a view to achieve the desideratum of global democracy through employment of diplomatic tools and military/ humanitarian interventions. Uncertainties about the effectiveness of transition processes (e.g., consolidation, privatization, democratization) in the states of the former Soviet bloc - Huntington's third wave predicament - had been typical for such a cardinal sweep.

Two foreign policy doctrines of the period consistently endorsed the idea of global democratic exceptionalism. The foreign policy doctrine of George Bush Sr. proclaimed collective security in the post-Cold War era and the Kantian liberal notions concerning inter-state cooperation to contain long-repressed ethnic and communal conflicts on a global scale. The second promise was encapsulated by Bill Clinton's doctrine which, in keeping with the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the collapse of former Yugoslavia, announced assertive but selective multilateralism and urged for the spread of democracy through constructive engagement (McEvoy-Levy 2001, 150-154). The only apparent difficulty was to choose between three competing military strategies of enforcing global democracy. Unilateralism, with its endorsement of assertiveness, hegemonism, preemption and the alternation of hard power with sophisticated politics, could eventually undermine globalism. Assisted multilateralism envisaged large military cooperation under the guidance of the United States, while multilateralism attempted to revive Wilsonianism in the formula of unconditional liberal internationalism (Smith 1994, 311-345). This set of strategies was rapidly assimilated - through severe criticism in many cases - to the so-called "Americanization of the world" (Beck 2003, 18-23). The globalization of democracy further upheld multiculturalism, environmentalism and the increasing role of non-state political agents, such as nongovernmental organizations (Brick 2008, 148). Soft-power politics (Nye 2004, 105) was about supplanting the belligerent dogma of the bipolar world with the global tools of public diplomacy; along the way, from hard-power politics to soft-power politics, one could notice the shift from geopolitics to geo-economics (Reich 1992, 133). Pundits in international politics anticipated that global liberal democracies grounded on moralism, principled idealism and liberal capitalism would have to confront the rising force of postmodern autocracies, such as Russia and China (Zakaria 2007, 91).

The story of American democratic exceptionalism in the aftermath of the Cold War has brutally reversed in the aftermath of 9/11, from optimistic globalism, through unilateralism, towards anti-globalization and neo-sovereignty. In order to explain these complex mutations, one has to consider the holistic militarism of George W. Bush and the populist and pseudo-isolationist exceptionalism of Donald Trump, respectively. In fact, excepting the attempts of the Obama administration to restoring multilateral and global democratic exceptionalism, both the above-mentioned leaderships stand for populist-oriented and anti-globalist types of neo-sovereigntist democracy. To start with George W. Bush, a series of questions demand lucid answers: are there legitimate justifications for the United States' assertiveness, unilateralism and use of the preemptive doctrine in the context of a multi-polar global world? Secondly, can "democracy go to war"? and, thirdly, isn’t there a principled contradiction between the rhetoric of belligerence and violence (e.g., war on terrorism) and the non-violent, consensualist, compromising and negotiating traits of democratic excellence? Inspired by the American neo-conservative exceptionalism which hailed messianism, preemption, imperialism, unilateralism, pride and intolerance (Holsti 2011, 402), Bush's bellicose approach claimed that the future salvation of democratic exceptionalism in the world would be dependent on the United States playing the role of "watchdog of democracy" and abandoning the soft-power political vocabulary of multilateral governance, international law, diplomacy, negotiations, patience and inducements altogether.

Furthermore, democratic exceptionalism seems to be distorted by autocratic exemptionalism visible within the rejection of international legal order and deemed as clashing with domestic interests. Striking exemplifications of dull, selfish and ultimately unaccountable neo-sovereigntism are the unilateral abrogation of the ABM treaty, the withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, the veto on the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, the refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the virtual abandonment of the Non-Proliferation Treaty by making side-deals with India, the invasion of  Iraq without the approval of the United Nations Security Council, the refusal to approve a new protocol to preserve the Biological Weapons Convention, and the US opposition to a draft treaty to control trafficking in small arms (Spiro 2000, 10). Vigorously maintaining that American sovereignty is inviolable, but insisting that sovereignty and territorial integrity of others can be breached when American security would deem it necessary, the new sovereigntists dispatch messages of strong leadership, exploit popular emotionalism and take refuge into false isolationism. They invoke power, legal right and constitutional duty to exclude international regimes and people (e.g., the Muslim ban of Trump's administration) and pretend to serve domestic crucial interests more than most. In this way, neo-sovereignty turns to autocracy in disguise and the long struggle to warrant exogenous democratic exceptionalism is reduced to mere arrogant exemptionalism. With its imperfections, shortcomings and idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, and despite the reprehensible dynamic of the idea of democratic exceptionalism from self-confidence to cynicism, restoring the lofty credentials of the democratic creed still remains "the last best hope of earth".

7. LIBERALISM

On the entanglements of American liberalism

Pledging to elucidate on the protean and elastic ideology of liberalism could generate intellectual frustration, procedural uncertainty and thematic incompleteness. Mainly because of its characteristic plethora, historical convolutions and ideological ramifications, it is preferable to engage into mapping liberalism by sketching versions of liberalisms, avoiding in this way complications stemming from wishful synthetic overview. Whatever the case, investigations of liberalisms with a view to configure a significant panorama or holistic approaches to liberalism as unifying ideological systems are procedurally risky and conceptually inconclusive. Perhaps retrospectively-oriented dynamic narratives and development outlooks are germane to understanding liberalism, its avatars, inconsistencies and inherent contradictions along certain evolutionary instantiations in the United States. In addition, liberalism is not only a complicated corpus of theories, ideological tenets and concrete political programs, but is also associated to a more or less fashionable set of attitudes, perceptions and conventional etiquettes symbolizing pluralism and diversity, freedom and free choice, voluntarism and entrepreneurialism, tolerance, equity, justice, secularism, and the list could include other relevant references to the comprehensive concept of liberalism.

A synthetic overview of American liberalism could not possibly incorporate all plausible ideological credentials and meanings, nor is it possible to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions in order to logically elucidate upon its comprehensive ideological consistency. Moreover, certain specifications as political, economic, social, and cultural liberalisms complicate the general picture rather than contributing to further illuminations. In the twentieth century, mainly because of enduring ideological tensions between the concepts of liberty and equality, the most far-reaching investigations of liberalism considered juxtapositions with conceptualisations of democracy, resulting in two distinct, albeit not always irreducible, categories of ideological approaches. The first one considered the democratic nature of liberalism as illuminative for the overall development of liberal mentalities and practices, with a particular focus on policies of inclusion, multiculturalism and aspects of diversity and pluralism. The other one resulted in the inverted terminology of liberal democracy that has been instrumentalized in order to characterize the present political civilization of the Western world and/ or, more specifically, to register past accumulations and revisions of liberal thinking towards its most extensive stage of development. However, these specifications have not guaranteed final semantic clarity, nor have they led to removal of ambiguities in regard to practical contents of the liberal ideology. Instead, further paradoxes and nuances have emerged, generating more nuanced debates on the topic along the way. For instance, highly challenging recent controversies have tested the resilience of liberal ideology in confronting the intrusive tendencies of state interventionism in private affairs. Accordingly, it is probably fair to say that the increased interference of states' affirmative actions and decision-making strategies have diminished and damaged the traditional substance of the liberal ideology. As a rule, it has been observed that deficits of liberal mentalities and institutions have generated haphazard mutations of the democratic ethos, while contraction and versatility of democratic values have been consistent with more or less vigorous discharge of classical liberal principles. By the same token, despite all salutary efforts to validate the coexistence between liberalism and democracy, it seems that their historical evolution has been mostly dialectical in nature (Barber 1988). Actually, it is commonsensical to assert that while the ideology of liberalism aims at dismantling centralized mechanisms of governmental power, democratic regimes and democratization processes look for negotiating and consensualist strategies between divergent and irreducible factions and interests (Bellamy 1999, 116).

Apart from hypothetic discrepancies between liberalism and democracy within recent debates in political theory, there are certain discontinuities between the ideological premises of liberalism and contextual realities of the present-day liberal world. Accordingly, testing the effectiveness of liberal individualism in the context of massification tendencies specific to postmodern consumerist societies is revelatory for maintaining, rejecting or reconstructing one of the most characteristic traits of the liberal ideology. In addition, comprehensive views on liberalism today demand an in-depth investigation of its core concepts' non-contradictory interrelationships with purportedly discordant notions. Thus, liberty has to be revised in order to cope with challenges posed by equalitarian drives, secularization should accomodate religious habits and traditions, constitutionalism has to resist authoritarian tendencies, and individualism has to be coherent with communitarian values and concerns. It is important to note that, notwithstanding inharmonious collocations specific to present-day liberal realities, the most threatening ideas for theoretical liberalism are neither illiberal, nor necessarily irreconcilable with the liberal doctrine; for the purpose of exemplification, political theorists have endorsed the mutual goals and convergence of interests between communitarian liberals and liberal communitarians (Beiner 1992, 20; Dworkin 1989, 479-504). Consequently, the greatest threats seem to undermine the liberal ideology from within, under pressure of losing relevance and self-consistency.

Beyond troublesome ideological concatenations and antithetical views to basic liberalism, the most recent controversies on the topic point to illiberalism as the prevailing enemy of liberal arrangements. Polysemous and usually identified with autocratic forms of political conduct, illiberalism tags what liberal attitudes are opposed to and is descriptive for a principled ideological contradiction of liberalism, a negation, a severe deficit, and/ or a counteroffensive to liberal supremacy in world politics. The development story of liberalism in the United States should probably follow a narrative logic according to which every notable achievement on the liberal trail withholds ideological deviations, penumbras and internal contradictions. Unfolding the narrative is tantamount to discovering the overall facets of American liberal ideology and even disparate liberalisms composing the extraordinarily nuanced and complex picture of liberal orientations in the United States. Under the circumstances of the present inquiry and for reasons of brevity, the study of liberal developments in the United States could not possibly meet analytical rigor and exhaustive consideration. Despite of what momentarily contrasted the original doctrine, the ideological tenets of American liberalism have seemed to escape trenchant crises and grew more and more intricate and paradoxical, with illiberal shades included. Ultimately, the complexity of liberalism in the United States stems not only from intrinsic discrepancies that have pushed forward its development, but also from an aboriginal cluster of amalgamated beliefs pointing at anti-statism and individual rights, secular virtues and values, tolerance towards religious pluralism, private property, free markets and economic entrepreneurialism (Geuss 2002, 323).

Individualist and secular liberalism in the founding era

The attribute of individualism is constitutive to the American liberal ideology. Having in mind the fact that the 'liberal' term as such was a transcultural acquisition and penetrated the vocabulary of American politics only during the 1820s, one could only invoke certain liberal intuitions of the founding fathers, without the capacity of indicating a systematic political program in line with nineteenth century classical liberalism. However, considering the impact of British economic liberalism and utilitarianism - in the works of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham - upon early conceptions and visions put to use for the purpose of designing a liberal republic, the framers' guiding imperatives were truly liberal in spirit. The ideological premises of rationalism and enlightenment became their articles of faith and the elimination of authoritarianism, tyranny and religious intolerance advised the founders' prudent construction of a new political culture. However, not all institutional arrangements of the founding era exhaustively matched the basic principles of political and economic liberalism, in consequence of the fact that the founding fathers were mainly interested in preserving the fragile political stability and feared further revolutionary energies. As they desired equilibrium and peaceful transition in circumstances of rampant individualism, tempering certain liberal passions impacted on the originalist design of the federal republic. Accordingly, the first illiberal stance that permeated the development of American liberal ideology mirrored an economic dilemma: in his writings, Thomas Jefferson defended the Lockean liberal dogma of private property, but rejected the idea of remunerated work, advocating, in this way, for a version of liberalism without capitalism. It seems that Jefferson used the concept of private property as a justificatory pretext for expropriation of native Americans and the romantic thesis of denying the role of money in economy as an argument to preserve the institution of slavery in the federal union (Katz 2003, 1-2). The renowned labels 'Jeffersonian agrarianism' and 'Hamiltonian industrialism' not only denoted two distinct perspectives on future development of economic liberalism in the United States, but were also expressive with reference to binary views on individualism of the age, one of romantic descent and the other entrepreneurial, respectively.

While revisionist historians of republicanism tend to explain the overall liberalization of American public life at the turn of the nineteenth century by giving prominence to the value of civism, liberal commentators point up to the overarching role of individualism in shaping the ethos of American society. If right-wing liberal scholars unquestionably agree upon the pervasiveness of individualistic enthusiasm, liberal voices of the left critically address the issue. In fact, defenders of right-wing individualistic liberalism have followed Alexis de Tocqueville's empirical observation that a profound individualistic tonus of the first generations of Americans had inhibited the manifestation of civic liberalism in the founding era. In time, adepts of this line of thought have had to resist a twofold criticism: on one hand, republican liberals have stressed upon the predilection of framers for endorsing the virtue of civic liberalism within the general conception of the originalist project, with the notable result of restraining "expressive liberalism", private ethics and individualism (Galston 2004, 17); on the other, social and communitarian liberals - notoriously MacIntyre, Gray and Rorty - avowed that the Hobbesian interpretation of individualism by the founding fathers had been detrimental to the civic constitution of society, public order and secular institutions of the early federal union. They precisely denounced the "anti-social, atomist, hedonist and morally subjective" characteristics of conceptual individualism (Machan 1998, 160).

Whatever the sides and substance of debates between liberals, the controversies per se stand for the complexity of the liberal ideology and its decomposition into liberalisms and multifaceted doctrinaire views. Alongside momentary illiberal whims, American liberalisms are vivid expressions of development conundrums within the most diverse and intricate of all American political ideologies. The story of liberalism gets more complicated and further refines each time other constitutive concepts of the American political tradition of thought have permeated the liberal vocabulary. For example, it is very difficult to establish the ideological lineage of the freedom of expression concept either as a trademark of original democratic impulses, or as a specificity of the liberal idiom. Partly because of these principled misunderstandings regarding the original tenets of American political ideologies, historical revisionism of the 1970s in the United States advanced the thesis of "multiple traditions" that concurred to providing ideological contours for the New World's political framework. The above-mentioned historians emphasized on the fundamental syncretism of early ideological ruminations, whereby the framers "selectively adopted, creatively integrated, and substantially reconstructed" (Gibson 2000, 261) a variety of ideological traditions of European descent. They built the American political tradition from the ground and laid its very foundation on the pillars of republicanism and liberalism, with minimum concern for the democratic stratum of the entire edifice.

It is probably true to assert that, in addition to momentous economic and political interests, the framers of the new order were cautious in balancing the prevailing liberal fervor with judicious institutional arrangements. From an ideological standpoint, they tried to accommodate liberal passions to the dominating rationale of promoting political emancipation at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this respect, one keen intuition of the framers was to anchor the new rationale into the ideological ground centered upon the reinterpretation of the concept of virtue. Thus, they 'squeezed' the Lockean protestant ethics that stood at the core of liberal individualism into the liberal ideological corridor characterized by the preeminence of civic virtues. But, since proper liberal intentions were not explicit within the new political design, various commentators and critics had to speculate on the real origins of liberalism in the New World. The mainstream line of thought was consistent with Louis Hartz's thesis according to which all founding efforts ultimately led to the emergence of what he called "the American liberal tradition". Alternatively, more recent endeavors of scholars such as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock derived the liberal tradition from civic humanism of Enlightenment descent (Matthews 1987, 1128-1130). In its turn, this interpretation was further amended for thinking on American liberalism in far too abstract, oversimplifying and moralizing terms. One critical version advanced a more realistic approach by extracting the genesis of the liberal creed from Scottish pragmatic utilitarianism and Protestant life habits, while virtue stood for a nominalist general term encoding the psychological profile of the first generations of Americans based on property, egoism, entrepreneurialism and pride (Diggins 1984, 33-35). In line with this type of pragmatic reassessment, another perspective postulated the pre-existence of an "empirico-liberal" mindset, originating in the primordial moral values of individualism and voluntarism (Brecher 1998, 138).

As liberalism emerged as an essentially secular ideology, the affinity of liberals towards embracing liberal values coalesced with attempts to derive them from ethical norms of Christianity. By and large, Protestantism adopted the basic tenets of liberal modernism, in attempting to domesticate Christian dogmatism in order to cope with the secular thought of rationalist Enlightenment. Accordingly, the Protestant mentality found no principled incompatibility between traditional Christian teachings and their efforts to integrate rationalist and liberal ideas within a post-enlightenment introspection of Christian theology, even if not all Protestant denominations accepted this trendy orientation. Evangelical conservatives, for instance, were reluctant to admit this fusion and obstinately continued to defend Christian theological dogmatism, even if most Protestants willingly integrated the epistemology and ethical values of modernity into the ethical norms and canon of Christian theology (Dorrien 2001, xxiii). This is the reason why liberal modernists who promoted innovation of dogmatic teachings in line with secular morality have been called - sometimes euphemistically - advocates of evangelical humanism, while the conservative defenders of Christian values have been associated to illiberal fundamentalism (Evans 2010, 99-101). It is worth noticing that, in the age of infant liberalism, the Christian illiberal fundamentalist was seen as the true preserver of religious values, while the liberal innovator was much under the scrutiny of still traditionalists.

In retrospect, the facets of liberalism in the founding era constituted a complicated puzzle of generative ideas and revealed the syncretic character of the emergent ideology at the intersection between individualistic passions and secular aspirations. Beyond inherent hesitations and exploratory endeavors, it is certain that early American liberals firmly stood against any centralizing tendencies and tyrannical intrigues. The individualist trend was plainly incorporated into solid constitutional arrangements and legislative policies for the purpose of defending the cause of individual rights: the first ten amendments to the original text of the federal Constitution in the Bill of Rights, Madison and Jefferson's opposition to Sedition Act of 1798, or the manifold tokens in order to balance the nascent nationalist impetuses stood as exemplary liberal attitudes. Even if the value of civism was appropriated by the republican ideological tradition, it would be fair to say that the liberal understanding of civic virtues essentially contributed to free participation in public affairs and tempered certain drives towards strong federal centralization. Overall, most recent postmodern critiques and reassessments of social sciences decidedly took polemical stances against the original liberal mindset and preeminently targeted the value of individualism (Davis 2003, 7).

Abolitionist and emancipate liberalism in the Civil War era

Slowly, but firmly, the liberal ideological syncretism of the founding age had expanded in order to include equalitarian stances that gradually resulted and increased in what Ronald Dworkin called "the rhetoric of rights' language" (Wolfe 2003, 21-40). Alongside traditional liberal ideas which upheld strong views about the natural character of free and egoistic individual, American equalitarian options brought their own contribution to the reduction of federal government's authority and control in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the founding era, the liberal approach of individualism had remained dominant, due to the founders' fears that equality and homogeneity of individual rights would bring about the tyranny of ignorant majority. In essence, this view was consistent with the post-Jeffersonian denial of the equalitarian principle: in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson refused to accept the idea of natural equality, simply because of noticing the real existence of inequalities (Koch and Peden 1944). For this reason mainly, Jefferson and his liberal followers evacuated the ideal of universal equality in the realm of the moral transcendental world by rejecting its instrumental value whatsoever. In the aftermath of Jefferson's death in 1826, a self-professed liberal and emancipate tradition of thought emerged in opposition to the individualistic and utilitarian liberal stream and had started to become more and more appealing within the public debates regarding the direction of political, economic and social developments of the United States. Notably, the manifestation of the first capitalist rudiments during the Jacksonian era had been generative of acute controversies in regard to explaining the genesis of class conflicts and moral inequalities. Whig moderate republicans were reluctant to accept the discrepancy between labor and capital, and formally denied the existence of class distinctions, while Jacksonian democrats largely explored this tension and became advocates of the labor class (Schlesinger Jr. 1945, 269-270). Considering as well the continuous democratization of public life during the 1830s and 1840s, the emancipating tendencies of various categories of marginal groups and individuals had eroded the ethics of liberal individualism in the United States. This phenomenon was also characteristic for the disparagement of European liberal civilization, where - under the spell of the French Revolution - the rise of the middle classes and consequent class conflicts, along with rampant centralization of power, led to the degradation of liberal aristocratic values, roughly in the period 1830-1870 (Kahan 1992, 135).

In contrast to early post-Jeffersonian and rather abstract controversies between liberals and egalitarians, the equality problem took pragmatic accents, beyond principled moral justifications. By mid-nineteenth century America, it turned obvious that the slave issue had already become instrumental for explaining all major political ruptures and debates, and that all pros and cons justifications for the preservation or abolition of slavery compromises had been focused upon defense or rejection of natural inequalities. The institutionalization of slavery in the United States confronted liberalism with the most troublesome inner contradiction in regard to the concept of individual freedom. Leaving aside the hypocritical solution according to which the entity of one slave valued three fifths of that of a free individual, the real challenge for all liberals was to resist criticism against the basic liberal dogma of individualism. Sometimes, they used quite baffling and paradoxical arguments. On the one hand, they came to argue that, from anti-federalists to Abraham Lincoln, the ethos of liberal individualism had been perverted by tendencies of Constitutional political control with a view to defend egalitarian ideals. Some radical liberals went so far as to denounce the immorality and hypocrisy of northern industrialists' opportunistic interpretation of liberty and saluted the southern conservative and agrarian preservation of the aristocratic sentiment of true liberty. They argued that it was precisely 'the institution of slavery' that could dignify the psychological mood and pride of liberty on the part of landowners and aristocrats (Selby 1956, 82-83). This peculiar and markedly partisan understanding of the concept of liberty generated an additional rift between emancipate liberals and conservative liberals.

On the other hand, traditional hard-line liberals could not remain insensitive to the fact that the path of American development and modernization was at odds with the conservation of slavery practices and mentalities and this was the reason why the liberal spectrum further complicated the options and arguments especially in regard to confronting the most pressing political agenda of abolitionism. Against the commonsensical oversimplification of the liberal divide between abolitionist liberalism and pro-slavery illiberalism, the panorama of liberal stances on the matter of abolitionism encompassed several non-consensual ideological nuances. Firstly, the perspective of liberal abolitionism contended the fact that African-Americans were denied freedom rights by birth and consequently advocated for the suppression of slavery. Secondly, due to the fact that slaves enjoyed the highest imaginable degree of liberty in specific historical circumstances and could not possibly emancipate as free individuals, anti-abolitionist liberals argued that slavery had to be preserved on grounds of 'good necessity'. Thirdly, illiberal abolitionists used the tools of cultural criticism in addressing slavery as a residual strategy of American aristocracy and cultural elites for defending WASP traditional values and rejecting emancipation of inferior races. Fourthly, anti-abolitionist illiberal views were mostly radical and explicitly endorsed slavery by postulating the thesis of African-American racial inferiority, either by nature or by divine intent (Ericson 2000, 9-15).

By and large, three fundamental views impacted upon the American political development in the age of abolitionism: one perspective advanced markedly liberal goals through republican means by attempting a post-Lockean ideological synthesis in political philosophy; the second approach was neither decidedly republican, nor convincingly liberal in its syncretic attempt to commingle the emergent liberal ideology with republican values and beliefs. Paradoxically enough, in the age of the Civil War and beyond, there had been a contrasting ideological divide between liberal individualists and equalitarian liberals, precisely grounded on the issues of racism, sexual inequality, ethnicity and xenophobia (Gibson 2000, 271-280).

For the most part of the nineteenth century, liberalism was both the ferment of and the impediment for abolitionist and democratization tendencies. Progressive liberals embraced the liberating momentum of the Civil War age and beyond, based on both intellective and behavioral reasons, while conservative and aristocratic liberals feared that emancipation and unfettered human freedoms could generate social unrest, loss of traditional order and, ultimately, degeneration of the sublime meanings of the concept of liberty. However, the ascendancy of equalitarian liberalism originally associated to abolitionist intellectual movements had been steady and ever-increasing in the post-Civil War reconstruction period, along with the populist and progressive backlash against liberal capitalism, in order to culminate with the all-encompassing political agendas of social liberalism in the 1930s and the civil rights movements of the 1960s. According to this interpretation, the comprehensive reformation of the liberal ideology in the troublesome contexts of nineteenth century American history did not happen due to equalitarian and abolitionist infringements only, but also included a massive ideological reconstruction due to circumstantial encounters with a new conceptual vocabulary pointing to justice, equality and equity. What really matters in regard to the historical development of the liberal ideology has not been limited to liberalism's brushes with historical challenges, but has been relative to certain paradoxical enhancements and entanglements. Thus, abolitionists such as Lydia M. Child, Frederick Douglas and Wendell Phillips did not strictly share markedly liberal views, while important anti-abolitionist activists such as Thomas R. Dew, George Fitzhugh or James H. Hammond were not necessarily enemies of new liberal aspirations. Even if egalitarian and abolitionist options have been mainly justified on liberal grounds, certain reasons, motifs and interests were not always tangibly liberal.

The most relevant case in point epitomized the intricate agendas of the transcendentalists. In their lofty and markedly metaphysical writings and speeches, most transcendentalist intellectuals shared a sweeping aversion towards Jeffersonianism and Calvinism, naturalism, liberalism, utilitarianism and empiricism. They rejected en bloc Locke, Hume, Jonathan Edwards and Jefferson, along with a principled hostility towards politics, embedded traditions and mercantile interests, and generally embraced sublime views on the spiritual emancipation of the individual from oppressing life conditions. It would be more appropriate to say that transcendentalists opted for spiritual liberation rather than liberal emancipation. They simultaneously rejected egalitarian passions and tendencies in the United States because of their worthless impact on the plenary manifestation of individual potential. For instance, the mentor of the movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was only equivocally liberal in his advocacy of individualism, free commerce and minimal state, while simultaneously spurning wealth, materialism, egoism and mundane interests (Diggins 1984, 197-202).

Industrialist and capitalist liberalism in the Gilded Age

Following the secession of slave states from the original union and the confrontation between the federal union of remaining states and the confederate seceding states in a four years bloody Civil War, it seemed that the adoption of three groundbreaking amendments to the Constitution in the period 1865-1870 would bring to an end the most major controversies of the last forty years. The ratification of Amendments 13, 14 and 15 to the Constitution of the United States that put a deathblow to slavery, defined citizenship, established legal egalitarianism and the due process principle, and guaranteed the right to vote for African-Americans, respectively, also aimed at reaching a less fragile consensus between egalitarians and liberals and settling the ideological disputes centered on the principled discrepancy between equality and freedom. During the age of Reconstruction and beyond, the development of liberalism in the United States eschewed the above-mentioned conceptual inconsistency and warranted for a compromising way out which liberals found in the concept of equality of opportunity. However, this approach has remained a mere illusion up to this day, since liberals endorsed the opportunity ingredient in their defense of entrepreneurialism, investments, big businesses and industrialization, while egalitarians highlighted syndicalism, mass protests, social rights and popular reforms in response. In other words, the ascendancy of liberal capitalism had to confront the pressures of egalitarian populism and administrative progressivism, so that the ideological development of liberalism had to encapsulate clarifying explanations about the pugnacious encounters between big capitals, corporations and unleashed economic competition, on the one hand, and rampant populism, democratization and tribulations of the federal managerial state, on the other.

Roughly in the period 1870-1930 the paradigm of economic liberalism was preeminently and almost exclusively challenged. It was precisely the liberal concept of sound economy based on massive investments of capital and emergence of big businesses, corporations and monopolistic tendencies that had been under popular scrutiny and fierce attacks. The conjunction between big money and big bosses or plutocrats, as they were pejoratively called, had created a general atmosphere of callous economic competition for domination, monopolistic interests and lobby in government. Further ignited by the prevailing expansionist spirit in line with Frederick Jackson Turner's theory of the frontier, the ideology of economic liberalism at the turn of the twentieth century emphasized the power of money, domination and ownership which politically paralleled the first form of American imperialism in Central America and the Caribbean region centered on annexationism and protectionism. Concisely stamped by Mark Twain as The Gilded Age, the uncompromising liberal pattern of capitalism and corporatism had marked the brutal transition from property-oriented 'benign capitalism' towards the power of monopolistic industries, harsh competition, grandiose investments and the emergence of American millionaires, characteristics specifically associated to 'savage capitalism'. In addition, due to the emergence of international markets, expansion of capitalist ownership, rapid industrialization, and the innovation of banking credit system, the model of liberal capitalism glorified material progress over moral and intellectual refinement, and devalued the classical concept of small private property along with the original virtues of individualism and private initiative (Cohen 2002, 86-87). According to available data, greedy interests related to monopolistic positions, political influence and legislative status created the premises for the fusion of more than 1800 small businesses in 157 consolidated corporations (Lamoreaux 1998). The Great Merger Movement, which took place between 1898 and 1902, was the accurate expression of competing interests, allotment practices and territorial expansion specific to high fusions and the creation of big entrepreneurial corporations. Moreover, public scandals surrounding businesses of big plutocrats and their expansionist interests especially related to massive investments in railway and roads infrastructure pressured the American legislative to define corporate property as an extension of the private property concept. In fact, the legal status of capitalist corporations instituted two competing liberal options of the time: on the one hand, progressive liberals promoted the theory of grant corporations, according to which corporations were granted public charters from the federal government and their activity was regulated through an agreement between government and the corporate industry; on the other, advocates of laissez-faire liberalism defended the trust theory of corporate businesses strictly regulated by private management in relation to investment of money and destination of land properties. However, both theories undermined the traditional liberal understanding of individual initiative and small enterprises (Cohen 2002, 96-108).

Liberal capitalism was an obstacle not only to progressive aspirations to regulate corporations and free competition, but also to populist attempts to curb the power of big money. In fact, the rise of populism at the end of the nineteenth century was associated to labor classes' riots and revolts against big corporations and industrial cartels. The emergence of labor unions and the protective programs of social rights for workers were meant to temper the negative economic effects of liberal capitalism. The first rudiments of social liberalism were encapsulated into the Populist Party manifesto of 1892 as necessary federal reforms in order to excoriate injustices generated by the liberal capitalist model. Populists and progressives alike demanded the enlargement of federal government's power for the purpose of regulating big businesses and purporting a climate of fair economic competition. To this end, reforms in consideration of redistribution of wealth, settlement of labor question and labor rights, introduction of a gradual federal tax on corporate income, nationalization of railways, roads and telegraph, requisition of corporate lands and other administrative ambitions were envisaged as appropriate means to domesticate savage capitalism. Following the defeat of populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896 presidential elections, the populist agenda gradually lost its prestige and public appeal, partly because of its markedly collectivistic and socialist content that was carefully justified as anti-liberal in spirit. In the first decade of the twentieth century, some progressive dissidents of the Democratic Party did their best to rejuvenate the populist anti-liberal rhetoric. Among other stratagems, they seized the opportunity to use the popular 1890 antitrust legislation, in their attempts to demand investigation of J. P. Morgan's businesses after 1902 and to promote standards of fair practices through Hepburn legislation of 1906. Furthermore, they endorsed the presidential campaign of the former republican president Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and his Bull Moose agenda against laissez-faire ideological liberalism (Brands 2001, 9-13).

The same 1912 presidential elections revealed the progressive counteraction to liberalism as well. The Democratic Party largely adopted the progressive tenets of (pseudo)scientific, administrative and bureaucratic government. As a matter of fact, the winning political program of Woodrow Wilson, suggestively entitled The New Freedom, decisively impacted the development of liberalism for the entire twentieth century. The basic assumption of progressive and democratic ideological orientations was that liberal views and practices would significantly improve once federal government affirmatively intervened in order to administrate and regulate public affairs of all sorts. With this view in mind, progressive democrats aimed to radically reconstruct the classical ideology of liberalism from political, social and economic standpoints. Politically, they eulogized the effective management of public life in the United States, with social engineering as one of their mostly extravagant and fastidious regulative tools. Economically, the progressive and democratic corrections have dismantled original liberalism and contradicted its most basic tenets; suffice is to say that President Wilson had the groundbreaking initiative of introducing the federal income tax (Pestritto 2005, 255-260), a policy at odds with the guiding liberal principle of economic freedom. Paradoxically enough, in the context of peace agreements and design of a new global order in the aftermath of the First World War, pundits in the field of international relations associated Wilson's principles of governmental conduct encapsulated in his Fourteen Points program to liberal internationalism (Hoffmann 1995, 159-177; Hoff 2007, 61). Woodrow Wilson's political temperament amassed all contradictions, inconsistencies and paradoxes of the new liberal imagery: the most remarkable political figure of the first two decades of the twentieth century happily married the self-determination principle and freedom of expression in international politics with his defense of racial segregation and anti-immigration, with his eccentric criticism of individual rights and checks and balances principle (Leonard 2016, 25, 50, 66, 167), and ultimately with his overall populist rhetoric aiming to 'liberalize' American politics and public life (Pestritto 2005, 199).

Any comprehensive revisionist analysis of progressive and populist counterattacks to liberal capitalism would discover not only a markedly anti-liberal spirit, but also a more insidious anti-democratic agenda. Purportedly scientific and pragmatic, the opposition to liberal capitalism in the progressive age epitomized bureaucratic administration, expertise, efficiency and managerial engineering. In disregard of individualism, free enterprise and competition, anti-liberals of the time endorsed state power and overall regulation and control. In many cases, their idiosyncrasies had changed in time, vacillating from liberal humanism and social paternalism towards an eclectic variety of social-democratic liberalism in the 1930s and the 1940s (Jordan 1994, 68-83).

By and large, in the period 1870-1930, classical liberalism had traversed perplexing ideological developments. Thus, the standard core concepts of individualism, property, entrepreneurialism and private autonomy had been steadily substituted by the marks of social collectivism, consumerism, and dependence upon state protectionism and vulgar materialism. On the other hand, widespread conceptions - allegedly liberal in kind - mirrored left-wing Fabian aspirations of activists such as Jane Adams, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and Florence Kelley, who pressed for sound social policies and class equity (Rossinow 2012, 20-21). Until these transformations of original liberal mentalities reached momentum within the comprehensive welfare state reforms of the 1930s, restless political activism and social turmoil aimed to domesticate economic laissez-faire capitalism.

Welfare state liberalism from New Deal to Great Society

The founding accomplishments at the end of the eighteenth century were only bordering on the intellectual tradition of Europe. In particular, the beginnings of American liberal civilization properly took place within the intellectual atmosphere of the transcendentalist movement and its various ethical concerns regarding the spiritual liberation of the individual. Accordingly, in the United States, the liberal ideology was originally rather apolitical due to its primary moral approaches to real individual liberty, in the same manner in which Spanish liberales attempted to replace the traditional moral order and the constricting privileges of the old aristocracy and the Catholic Church. The first noteworthy political embodiment of ideological liberalism in the United States found its intellectual and cultural expressions in the movement of abolitionism, but the first important test for the liberal ideological tenets occurred in the context of progressive and populist opposition to maximal individualism of laissez-faire economic liberalism. A general popular discontent with regard to political and economic inequalities and perceived injustices paved the way for a widespread social critique of classical liberalism and prompted for the radical reconstruction of the liberal ideology in order to subsume social demands. Consequently, the agenda of social liberalism had absorbed all momentous controversies of political and economic liberalism, reaching its glory days especially between the 1930s and the 1960s. Politically, restraining individualism through affirmative action of the reformist and interventionist federal government was justified on behalf of equality of opportunity command; economically, free competition, corporatism and monopolies were curbed by the regulative and managerial federal power on behalf of redistribution of wealth. Accordingly, originating in the New Deal encompassing reforms of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and spinning out to the Great Society political agenda of President Lyndon Johnson, the comprehensive macro-social reforms not only smoothed the liberal mindset because of democratic retaliation and equalitarian pressures, but also elevated the Keynesian precepts of state interventionism in economy to the detriment of laissez-faire liberal principles. The logical result of these massive readjustments was social liberalism and its self-acknowledged honorable aspirations towards rational control, pragmatic (and moral) administration, fairness, justice, redistribution and, ultimately, welfarism (Hirschman 1997). The germane presupposition of social liberals was that centralized coordination and control of public life should moderate the individualist greed and accumulative aspirations specific to liberal capitalists.

According to an alternative approach, social liberalism of the welfare state dialectically succeeded classical and capitalist liberalism, in the sense that the affirmative reforms protecting collective justice substituted the mainstream focus on securing the rights of the individual. This shift of liberal thought towards embracing collectivism debuted in the New Deal era, entangled democratic views in the aftermath of World War II for what has been called "inclusive democracy" (Raskin 2004, 103), and culminated with the flat equalitarian vocabulary of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Along the way, affirmative action, control, redistribution, positive rights, welfarism, pluralism and wide-ranging tolerance had dominated the ideological rhetoric of social liberalism. Apologists of the social emendation of liberalism considered that the progressive impetuses towards reformism and democratization of American public life successfully domesticated liberalism through pragmatic, realist, non-dogmatic and ultimately non-ideological rhetoric (Plotke 1996, 163). Moreover, President Roosevelt's strategy of rejecting rigid and abstract distinctions between capitalism and socialism resorted to amalgamating useful contents he found in both in order to pursue a coherent liberal conduct in politics, proving in this way the arbitrariness of net disjunctions (Schlesinger Jr. 1960, 651). At the core of the so-called liberal reconstruction, the opportune compromise, pragmatism and common sense virtues of liberal sagesse intermingled state interventionism, clientage and reform administration tenets of progressive liberalism. While apologists generally saluted the social correction of dogmatic liberalism, detractors suspected populist and progressive reforms of socialist and/ or fascist contaminations.

A different perspective on the development of ideological liberalism at the end of the 1920s postulated the thesis of 'welfare capitalism' centered on rational control of investments, minimization of business cycles risks, stabilization of industries and general prosperity (Holl 2005, 18). Known as the Hooverian type of associationism, the practice of collaboration between private businesses and the federal state had expanded in the 1930s and the 1940s, as a necessary effect of the 1929 stock market crash, and had divided supporters of strict planification theories in the realm of economic affairs from those ascertaining that federal control should cover all sectors of public life (Jordan 1994, 233). The Roosevelt administration found a supposedly liberal compromising solution in the "intelligent collaboration" strategy (Holl 2005, 7) between public and private interests, and justified the federal mechanisms of regulative control by amalgamation of liberal beliefs with innovative principles of social democracy. In the eyes of the new liberal visionaries, the incontestable merits of the composite between liberalism and social democracy were related to mitigation of constricting liberal dogmas and constructive adaptation of abstract social engineering, technocracy, management, planification and control in the troubled historical context of interwar America. Generally associated to the reformist spirit of progressive liberals, social and democratic liberalism gained momentum with Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1944 discorse on the state of the nation, entitled The Economic Bill of Rights, whereby the incumbent President announced a revolutionary reform of individual rights including minimal entitlements to work, food, clothing, education and health. This approach inaugurated a commonplace practice of US federal government that culminated with President Kennedy's famous Executive Order 10925 of 1963 (Bush 2007, 298-299). Furthermore, this understanding of liberalism proliferated beyond the domestic borders of the United States within a set of prerequisites to maintaining and consolidating the international liberal order. Accordingly, what has been labeled embedded liberalism refered to a specific conceptual aparatus pointing to distributive justice and procedural equity, multilateralism, free commerce, equal access to goods and services, legalism and international institutions (Steffeck 2006, 35-36). Thus, the liberal revival occurred through the abandonment of laissez-faire liberal capitalism and the instauration of Wilsonian and Rooseveltian liberal principles of progressive descent.

The most notorious federal programs which promoted welfare state liberalism in the United States and which decisively influenced global politics were the two New Deal plans of President Roosevelt in the 1930s, the Point Four strategy of international assistance for developing countries of President Truman in the late 1940s and the Alliance for Progress policy of President Kennedy in the early 1960s. Purportedly conceived to close the gap between liberalism and social democracy, these influential agendas were centered on the comprehensive intervention of federal government with a view to implement a visionary concept of liberty grounded on constant emancipation, education, gradual improvement of life conditions and equalization of opportunities (Beinart 2006, 192-193). There were also certain concurrent mobilizing factors that contributed to the overall transformation of ideological liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century. Firstly, one should mention the liberal activism of the Popular Front movement in disseminating cultural pluralism and anti-racist civil conduct (Myrdal 1944); this initiative was revived in the context of counter-cultural liberalism of the 1960s. Secondly, a series of facts and actions, such as the public recognition of NAACP by President Truman, the direct involvement of Kennedy administration in releasing Martin Luther King from prison in 1961 (Chafe 2003, 161-180), or the creation of National Organization for Women during Johnson's administration (Harrison 2003, 243-274), were illustrative cases of affirmative action and federal interference in the public sphere that were occasionally denounced as practices of discrimination in reverse. For most nineteenth-century classical liberals, such actions would have been utterly scandalous.

Notable as well were the shortcomings of welfare state liberalism, beyond the optimistic parade of its slogans. For example, in 1946, the Republican majority in Congress put certain obstacles to the New Deal system by rejecting the Wagner Act and the legislative bills on social security (Brands 2001, 67). Furthermore, with reference to American public diplomacy, the neoconservative agenda severely criticized the framework of welfarism as logically incompatible with the US post-war strategic interests in combating collectivist and paternalist impetuses of Soviet communism. Mostly contradictory were the ideological attitudes shared by partisans of the New Left movement: even if many reform initiatives of social and progressive liberals - with the large contribution of the interventionist federal government - further ignited political participation, pacifism, egalitarianism and activism for civil rights, the acute radicalization of the New Left movement in the 1960s brought about harsh opposition to political centralization and federal interference in public life. Confidently adopting a liberal ideological positioning, as proselytes of Dewey and Wright-Mills, the adepts of New Left radicalism moved steadily towards a form of postmodern anarchism (Mattson 2002, 188-197). They were fiercely denounced by neoconservatives as liberal imposters, traitors of American values and Stalinists.

Around the mid-1960s, the popular confidence in the blessings of welfare state liberalism had started to quiver. The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the replacement of his New Frontier program by Johnson's Great Society surrogate, and the escalation of the Vietnam War created a general atmosphere of doubt and disbelief in regard to the effective powers of the administrative state to cope with pressing domestic and international challenges of the time (Mattson 2004, 173-174). Within the Democratic Party, there was a split of ideological options and appropriate future strategies. While the leader of the constantly decreasing creed of social liberalism, George McGovern, still insisted on the prodigy of welfarism and social justice and manipulated the anti-war rhetoric, his old political friend, Hubert Humphrey, decided to change direction towards embracing the more compelling liberal combativeness of the Cold War ideological vocabulary, along with the anti-communist propaganda and the post-Eisenhower military-industrial complex (Miroff 2012, 100-105). The agony of welfare liberal daydream was not only precipitated by the neoconservative siege, but was also subjected to its own hesitations, inconsistencies and weaknesses.

Aside from the geopolitical context of the Cold War and deep domestic - social, political, economic and cultural - transformations, other three ideological alternatives have steadily undermined the creed of social and welfare state liberalism. Associated to economic libertarianism in Hayek, Rothbard and The Chicago School of Economics, one critical perspective strongly advocated spontaneous economic order generated by preservation of free markets and dismissed the intervention of regulative federal government and the principles of social justice altogether. Another point of view acclaimed liberal constitutionalism of the minimal state in Rawls, for instance, which was presumed to legitimately derive the principles of justice from consensualism and shared rationality. The third critical alternative to welfarism was postulated within the multicultural emphasis on social and identity contexts to the detriment of holistic approaches of social liberalism (Bellamy 1999, 17-89). Up to this day, the uncompromising supporters of welfare state liberalism, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Obama, have argued that its shortcomings are rather minor and critiques rather void. They strenuously maintain that both the doctrine and the policies of social liberalism reveal an essentially reformist spirit along with the invalidation of dogmatic classical liberalism, obstinately centered on property and individualism (Klosko 2017, 249-262).

The brand new geopolitical world of neoliberalism

One contributing catalyst to the decline of welfare state liberalism was the ideological divide between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. Among other factors, the ebullient propaganda of neoconservatives with a view to denouncing the brutal intervention, economic planification and overwhelming socio-political control of totalitarian communism proved the best opportunity to find analogous, albeit exaggerated, practices within the administrative conduct of post-New Deal welfare state in the US. Some intransigent voices went so far as to to assimilate New Deal welfarism to European collectivist socialism and/ or adamant fascism. Returning to authentic liberal principles and values became fully consistent with subverting the infringements of welfare government into daily lives of millions of Americans. In addition, the rehabilitation of liberalism proved the US commitment to explicitly delimitate from totalitarian mentalities and to destroy communism. For that end, the new liberals strove to provide convincing arguments by launching a markedly assertive ideological and public propaganda at home and abroad.

The new visionaries - formerly utopian leftists and Trotskysts of the interwar period, anti-communist conservatives and liberal elites - advanced an expansionist and aggressive ideological agenda to annihilate communist sympathies and to inspire genuine Americanism. Under the mentorship of traditionalist conservative and liberal elites formally or informally associated to think-tanks and private foundations, such as Mont Pelerin Society, Heritage Foundation, Rand Corporation, Brookings Institute, Cato Institute, the neoliberal activists attemted to revive the authentic liberal spirit in a world of oppression and rampant extremism. However perplexing it might sound, the ideological compact between conservatives and liberals in reach of the neoliberal path was solidly grounded on the unanimous conviction in regard to freedom of the market paragon. At variation with the dictum ''conservatism is at its best when liberalism is at its worst" (Wolfe 2009, 96), conservative liberals and neoconservatives conjoined to meet the ultimate ends of economic liberalism embraced by the neoliberal views. A more flexible view shared by moderate liberal conservatives accepted both free markets in the restrictive sense of non-interventionism and social markets in the positive sense of governmental legal protection (Gamble 2006, 21-22). Eventually, the more fundamentalist approach of neoliberal elitism has been severely stigmatized because of its unyielding dogmatism based on authoritative technocracy and cultural and educative arrogance (Scholler and Groh-Samberg 2006, 171-172). Critics of allegedly neoliberal egotistic elitism seemed to have forgotten the self-proclaimed scientific superiority of progressive liberals along with their unshakeable belief in the benefits of efficient administration and rational control.

Post-war neoconservatives and detractors of welfarist social liberalism largely agreed on the salience of three neoliberal pillars: private property, rule of law and free international markets and commerce. Early critics of neoliberalism suspected the new ideological orientation of economic imperialism favored by postwar international arrangements. Thus, the mondialization of economy was suspected for supporting international monopolies and/ or multinational corporations for the purpose of weakening individual liberty. Political non-interference was supposed to render regulation by law futile, and, in real terms, global financial institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and regional economic associations (NAFTA, ASEAN, Mercosur, the European Union) were suspected of exerting sectarian economic domination to the detriment of national economic interests and free economic exchanges (Harvey 2005, 64-81). At the heights of the so-called neoliberal Washington Consensus, the architects of economic globalism have still preserved a deep mistrust towards the Keynesian consensus of welfare state liberalism. In their view, the postulates of international markets, state non-interventionism, transnational corporations, international financial institutions and mobility of capital have been maintained as sound economic remedies of erroneous dogmas of European social liberalism based on high rates of economic growth, technological change, consumerism, social protection systems and low unemployment (Dumenil and Levy 2005, 9-10). In addition to prevailing economic concerns of neoliberals, political neoliberalism in the United States has emerged in the context of postwar international policies of President Truman and the doctrine of active multilateralism of 1949, and emphasized on commonly shared views on national productivity in the world of liberal democracies, scientific innovation, modernization of societies and global peace. One of the most inspiring stimuli for the embracement of ideological neoliberalism was the publication of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's book The Essence of Security in 1968, whereby the author advanced the thesis of defensive modernization through eliciting military security in a highly uncertain and unstable post-colonial world (Craig and Porter 2006, 48-53).

By and large, various critics have analysed the ideological tenets of neoliberalism in close connection to three correlative conceptual orientations, namely libertarianism, globalization and neo-imperialism. First of all, the ideological encounters between neoliberalism and libertarianism have been problematic, even though, in the eyes of critics mostly, libertarianism has been placed at the radical right of neoliberal thinking. For instance, libertarians have pushed to the extreme the thesis of economic purification from any form of state intervention. Moreover, neoliberals were reluctant in totally accepting the libertarian demand for the complete ejection of social justice outside germane liberal concerns. According to some radical libertarian theorists, even the governmental guarantees on public security and fundamental policies in regard to health and education assistance should be removed completely (Rothbard 1978). Yet, most neoliberals shared Robert Nozick's famous metaphor of the 'night-watchman state', but placed themselves at variation with libertarian purism about the strict preservation of individual liberty. A markedly ideological and policy difference was that neoliberals have mostly insisted upon reduction of taxes and erradication of market restrictions, while libertarians, both radical and moderate, maximized the freedom of choice principle (Birch and Tickell 2010, 42-46). Even though hard-line libertarianism uncompromisingly attempted to rehabilitate the ethical and normative foundations of political thinking, a more pragmatic and moderate libertarian faction backed the efforts of neoliberals to restore the lost dignity of genuine liberalism. In their search for sustainable liberal solutions, neoliberals and moderate libertarians sometimes committed themselves to reforming social liberalism from within; in the 1970s for instance, two prestigious libertarian think-tanks, Cato Institute and Brookings Institution, advanced constructive proposals to meet the crisis of social security system in the United States, especially in regard to the pension system and health insurance policies (Shapiro 2007, 285). In the age of civil rights, neoliberals and conciliatory libertarians alike understood that strong opposition to social liberalism could have resulted in public opprobrium and marginalization.

The neoliberal urge for the expansion of international markets under the supervision of international legislation through precise regulatory mechanisms has prompted both criticism and commendation concerning the ideological juxtaposition between neoliberalism and globalization. More recently, the doctrine of globalization has been assessed as the apex of neoliberal outright propaganda and has bluntly divided persuasive militants from redoubtable critics. On one side, apologists and optimists have appraised neoliberal globalization as the only viable solution in coping with postmodern technological innovations and far-reaching pluralism. Associated to the ideological victory of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War and the new Americanization of the world, one of the first notable embodiments of the neoliberal globalization was accomplished by Al Gore's Global Marshall Plan in 1990, with its innovative interpretation of redistributive multilateralism based on reduction of disparities between liberal countries of the world, and with a special focus on ecology and sustainable policies (Steffeck 2006, 151). Furthermore, most neoliberal optimists of the period have shared a post-Fordist view on global politics, according to which professional specialization, technological innovation, internet communication and consumerism, under careful and robust financial control, were supposed to provide world pace, collective security and general prosperity. In the eyes of disbelievers, this neoliberal twist of world political and economic affairs was nothing else than "financially guided capitalism" (Hilferding 1981). The economic effects of neoliberal economism in terms of high public debts, financial and monetary risks, consumerism and waste, real estate bubbles and deepening cleavages between the few reach and the many poor constituted the negative side of story for nostalgic social liberals. Moreover, pessimists and critics alike have thought that the mirage of high incomes, general prosperity, widespread international investments and goods exchanges concealed subversive interests of G8 and big financiers related to misappropriation of all resources and elimination of opposition through creation of dependencies resulting from providing financial assistance (Bush 2007, 178). Overall, leaving aside the multifaceted ideological disputes between liberals, there was a widespread confidence that the so-called neoliberal contraction of the 1990s could be curbed by massive investments in indispensable information technologies, despite the lack of consensus regarding the competent authorities that could carry out such an innovative plan. While leftists believed that only a populist type of leadership could rise to the occasion, the solution on the right wing was neo-managerial capitalism (Dumenil and Levy 2011, 326-330). Also in the 1990s, communitarians, such as Etzioni, Reich or Giddens, imagined what they called 'the third liberal alternative' to neoliberal cynicism and bossy social liberalism, by endorsing the virtues of robust civil societies, high-standard public services, equity, democracy and cohesion (Bieling 2006, 214-216).

Further suspicions towards the harmful effects of neoliberal internationalization and globalization had been augmented by critical drives which vilified the expansionist markets and the limitation of national economic control through regulatory mechanisms imposed by international financial and monetary institutions. Precisely, allegedly new forms of imperialism and/ or neo-colonialism using the tools of expansive economic neoliberalism have been under constant scrutiny. Prompted by brand new geopolitical opportunities in world affairs, hegemonic control and cynical commandments of financial global elites were seen by malcontented critics as the logical results of neoliberal expansionism. Thus, the merciless neoliberal leviathan has been depicted as the most onerous alternative to multilateral, constructive and diplomatic liberalism from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman. In response to such sordid accusations, neoliberals have defended their reputation by invoking the cosmopolitanism of global options and its efficient outbalance of narrow nationalisms and autarchic patriotisms, intolerance and xenophobia, illiberal fundamentalisms and extremism. Through different lenses, the neoliberal doctrine could be identified with benefic humanitarian interventionism and financial international assistance. According to neoliberals, the hegemonic and imperialist epithets could not be reasonably maintained, since financial guidance and market evangelism have not been carried out through military interventions and belligerent attitudes. Recent criticism has endorsed the thesis that precisely this subversive neoliberal conduct enabled the unilateral logic of George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. Frankly, the American neoconservative hegemonic approach of international politics in the formula of 'benevolent imperialism' was prepared in the ideological laboratory of neoliberalism (Tabb 2006, 174). Moreover, leaving aside the critical stances on the antiterrorist unilateral strategy of President Bush Jr., a kind of diffuse global common knowledge has constantly spread the thesis according to which globalization per se has been concocted by neoliberal policies and hidden international interests of the United States, with a view to maintain and consolidate its geopolitical position of hegemonic power. Even if some friendly critics assert that the US hegemonic and unilateral conduct in world politics is just a temporary and momentous approach imposed by circumstantial reasons, the hypothesis that the US have obstinately strived to preserve its geopolitical status as a provider of global stability and security still stands (Ikenberry 2011, 122, 222-225).

The plethora of criticism on the neoliberal doctrine exceeds partisan liberal debates. In context, I would add three significant critical arguments. Firstly, neoliberalism has been under the siege of both 'right wing politics' and 'left wing academia'. If right wing ideologues have reproached the cutback of individualism and private property to the detriment of promotion of compromising international regulations, left wing scholars have denounced the suppression of widespread egalitarian aspirations by the preeminent focus on extolling the freedom of international economic exchanges (Kloppenberg 1998, 10-11). Secondly, from a pragmatic standpoint, critics have noted the real inconsistency of the very neoliberal premises. Thus, the neoliberal markets are not naturally free, but ideologically constructed; the neoliberal ideology does not evacuate the state as an active participant, but simply restructures the principles of government in order to fit the neoliberal agenda; the neoliberal free citizen of the world is nothing more than a dependent consumer of cheap satisfactions, international cooperation is hidden competition, and internationalization as such a convenient euphemism for neo-imperialism (Munck 2005, 60-66). And thirdly, one peculiar reassessment of strategic neoliberalism in the United States undervalued the concatenations with internationalism and globalization, and advanced the supposition of the domestic reorganization of capital by the Reagan administration for the sole purpose of stopping the devaluation of the American dollar (Campbell 2005, 187-195).

The post-liberal world in the new century

In a world of demistifications and disbelief what Lyotard called 'the grand narratives', of the end of history, ideologies and objective knowledge altogether, the nihilist and apocalyptic relativism has steadily - and paradoxically - campaigned for a better, non-dogmatic and essentially inclusive world of the future. This view remains paradoxical, since all relativist and postmodern approaches share an unremitting distrust towards past accomplishments. It logically follows that a better world is possible ex nihilo... However, when it comes to positive clarifications of world realities we live in, ontological relativism concomitantly decrees the decline or sheer extinction of its object of investigation and attributes the apparently inoffensive epithet 'post' as a prefix for that object within a carefully conducted strategic 'discourse'. In other words, only in its 'post' incarnation, the respective object of investigation substantially continues to exist. Accordingly, post-modernity, post-truth, post-theory, post-history, post-ideology and other imaginable 'posts' escape inspection of the traditional rigors of foundationalist and epistemic knowledge and take substantial contours allegedly outside preestablished criteria and canonic thinking, in the plural world governed by the 'anything goes' principle. Equally, the term 'liberalism' has not escaped the prefix adscription: in the eyes of postmodern relativists, 'post-liberalism' either refers to a comprehensive rebuttal of traditional liberal civilization and values, or to a positive amelioration of past frailties and fallacies of the liberal ideology. Thus, post-liberalism is either anti-liberal or 'beyond' liberalism. Post-liberalism either decrees the death of the liberal tradition, or professes a better liberal world of the future in defiance of old liberal beliefs.

In the context of the Cold War ideological confrontation between totalitarianism and liberal democracies, the United States symbolized the leading protagonist of the liberal world. That is why some critics have equated the collapse of Cold War liberalism and the emergence of the post-liberal order with the 'post-American world' (Zakaria 2008). Logically, this rather stereotypical association impels two significant consequences: first, that the most characteristic traits of American political culture have been unequivocally liberal, and second, that post-liberal world arrangements will be antithetical to traditional American liberal civilization. Conceptualizing the (American) post-liberal world would be tantamount to admitting three mutually exclusive ideological occurrences: acknowledging the irrefutable decline of liberalism, or preserving the liberal civilization in conditions of major readjustments required by present imperatives, or specifying what post-liberalism substantially means.

Firstly, the ascertainment that the development of democracies and democratization processes has prevailed over the liberalization of political societies during the entire twentieth century and beyond has prompted scholars to agree upon the decline of liberal values and principles. Larry Diamond observed that, although most world countries would probably turn democratic by 2050, it does not necessarily follow that they will turn more liberal as well (Higley and Burton 2006, 184). In consequence, the future development of democratic political regimes will spread out in disjunction with various liberal constrictions. Other scholars do not openly acknowledge the dissolution of liberal democracies from within and warn about the destructive potential of external factors, such as the accumulation of power by emergent illiberal regimes (McGowan 2007, 189-193). I dare say that populism stands as the most resourceful (and legitimate) expression of power amassment and as the most effective potential peril for overturning the liberal world order. In line with this deleterious anticipation, a report of the American Political Science Association in 2004 recorded that the steady decline of liberalism in the United States has been consistent with the flaws of democratic governance, the economic and racial polarizations, and the continual decrease of political participation and growing cynicism (Brauer 2006, 208-212).

The desiderate of preserving the liberal civilization is feasible due to four types of arguments. What I would call the compromising argument connects the survival of liberal political cultures with safeguarding their universalist and meliorist tenets only and abandoning the other ideological ingredients altogether. If not, an essentially divided post-liberal part of the world would have to cohabit with non-liberal political cultures (Gray 1995, 85-96). The second one, the coherence argument, postulates the necessity of convergence between political and economic dimensions of liberalism. In the absence of this junction, more and more political scientists warn about the emergence of illiberal political regimes or about significantly altered versions of liberal orders. In this respect, the narratives of China and India are illustrative. China has constantly forfeited political liberalism and more or less successfully implemented the precepts of economic liberalism. Conversely, India has aimed at protecting fundamental political liberties while imposing a severe control of economic progress (Hardin 1999, 43). With its experiential imperfections notwithstanding, the US example still remains explanatory for the possibility of prolonging political and economic liberalism. Thirdly, the innovation argument postulates the desiderate of international liberal order rebranding, in the formula of what has been termed 'the post-hegemonic liberal internationalism 3.0', centered upon the principles of universalism, post-Westphalian sovereignty, rotation of states' leadership upon international financial institutions, and binding international legal norms (Ikenberry 2009, 74). Finally, the alternative model argument advances three main possibilities: renegociating/ recalibrating the American model, finding a plausible post-American liberal world order, or establishing a liberal international system based on fragmentation and dynamic rivalries.

For all that, in the wake of supposedly defunct liberalism, the post-liberal imagination is free to concoct its ideological rationale. As long as the liberal spirit prevails, post-liberalism is confined to critical hassles, but it will turn more and more probable with the increasing setback of the liberal creed. Substantially, the post-liberal thinking aims to proclaim its values where the liberal tradition failed. Specifically, post-liberalism purports to resurrect international solidarity, participatory politics, egalitarianism to the detriment of meritocracy, public goals instead of private interests, and voluntary associations in the place of egocentric individualism. According to some critics of liberalism, accomplishing these desiderates requires more than a comprehensive reform of liberal thinking: it would be tantamount to dismantling what they have termed the 'iron law of liberalism' (i.e., the more liberal a society is, the more deep-seated its bureaucracy, procedures, instruments and market fundamentalism) (Graeber 2016). In the United States, Hollywood cultural dissidence, Occupy Wall Street and ecologism represent recent post-liberal movements which have harshly denounced liberal corruption and imperialism (Baum 2016). Howsoever instructive, an in-depth investigation of the post-liberal imagination falls outside the scope of this book.

8. CONSERVATISM

The inconsistent tradition: elitism and loathing in the conservative land

The stories of the conservative mindset in the United States are either utopian and retrograde constructions, or contextual and purpose-dependent endeavors; they are intricate rather than coherent narratives, particularly biased rather than objectivist approaches, historically-oriented rather than purist and dogmatic persuasions. Moreover, most considerations on the genealogies, historical evolution and the characteristic vocabularies of conservatism in the United States are far from complete elucidations and exhaustive interpretations. Many scholars and researchers have not agreed yet on the existence of a genuine conservative tradition in America. Some political thinkers and intellectual historians (Hartz 1955; Trilling 1950) epitomized the development of the entire political tradition in the United States in strict liberal terms. Others were rather skeptical about giving recognition to a conservative strain of thought: Richard Hofstadter, who coined the term "pseudo-conservatism" (Schoenwald 2001, 14-15) and Samuel Huntington, who formulated the inadequacy argument (i.e., there has never been an ancien regime to be defended against reactionaries) and the inconsistency argument (i.e., should there have been a political tradition in America, then it is the progressive-liberal tradition to be defended), questioned the existence of a genuine conservative tradition in the United States. A third stream of intellectual reflection, remarking the manifestation of more and more conservative impulses and passions, equivocally concluded about the impossibility and ineffectiveness of asserting a singular and mainstream ideological tradition in the United States: this orientation either moved towards the postulation of the "end of ideology" thesis (Bell 1955; Bell 1960; Lipset 1960) or, as in the case of Daniel Boorstin, aimed at reaching a genuinely American sense and consensus of history (Soffer 2009, 269). In synthesis, one could register the first two generations of conservative traditionalists, organicists and elitists and the third generation of radical, doctrinarian and imperialist conservatives. The first two generations include moderate and reflective conservatives, such as Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter, Peter Viereck, Robert Nisbet or Leo Strauss, while the third (Paul Wolfowitz's generation) is composed of outright political ideologues, radical imperialists and unilateralists forming the assertive line of neo-conservative militancy. In more or less strident tones, all of them were notable critics of socialism, communism, liberalism and their variations. However, it should be noted that the third radical approach to conservatism in the United States was considerably inspirited by the tradition of neoconservative journalism of the 1950s and beyond, which received alternative and versatile denominations such as ultra-conservatism, the new right, and/ or the new conservatism.

In the absence of precision in establishing the tradition of conservative thought and its impact on various American intellectuals and their commitment to its core doctrine, several critics and commentators tried to find out markedly conservative imprints on the historical evolution of political traditions, culture and behaviors in the United States. Some identified remnants of the conservative orientation and understanding of politics in the colonial period, based on the communitarian and religious organization of the early American colonies (Bradford 2009, 145-152). Others observed that the southern conservative orientation in the first half of the nineteenth century draws back to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson which, paradoxically, was also claimed by the defenders of "scientific liberalism" in the first half of the twentieth century (Tate 2005; Gottfried 2007, 5). More precisely, certain research identified the moralist and natural law orientations of Russell Kirk and Peter Stanlis with the intellectual tenets of Burkean conservatism (Jones 2017, 3). One cannot deny the conservative energies of the glorious age of American nationalism - in the writings of John C. Calhoun, for instance - and beyond (Francis 2009, 189-199). The opposition to abolitionism was mostly attributed to southern conservative aristocracy in the Civil War era, and many American intellectuals and political actors were consistently influenced by the reformist progressive agenda, roughly in the period between 1880 and the 1920s (Friedman 2005). Following the conservative administrations of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, some conservatives of the interwar period and beyond insistently called for prudence, "continuity" and "self-restraint", demanding also a centrist approach to politics, beyond sterile controversies with both progressives and liberals (Viereck 1949). After 1945, Russell Kirk argued that the nineteenth-century southern mentality and conduct in politics should be revisited in searching for solid ideological foundations for the postwar conservative "southern strategy" of the twentieth century (Mattson 2008, 48-56).

The existence of several conservative strains of thought in the United States before the late 1940s proves the incoherent, non-systematic and vacillating character of the conservative ideology itself. Following certain enthusiastic, reformist and idealist prerequisites of proto-conservative intellectuals in the early 1930s and a general mood of disenchantment, disappointment and revolt both towards utopian socialism and social liberalism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, some reputed American intellectuals experienced anxiety and anger towards the illusory power of ideologies to solve the most pressing political questions of the period. Leaving aside certain considerations concerning their affinity with the conservative mindset and their own disapproval in regard to being labeled as conservatives, I would argue that the 1940s were a decade of ideological confusions, resentments and denials consistent with what I would call ideological syncretism (i.e., doctrinal attempts to save what seemed viable and valuable out of the utopian and irrational contents of traditional ideological orientations). As a matter of fact, two scholars characterized the new ideological orientation as an "admixture of themes from liberal, conservative and socialist traditions", which they called the "ideological pigeonhole" (Halper and Clarke 2004, 48). This does not mean to postulate the differences between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives in terms of ideological syncretism by muddled terminological permutations guided by a specific rationale - distinguishing, for instance, traditionalists as "liberal conservatives" from neoconservatives as "conservative liberals" (Henrie 2004, 15-19) - but rather to find the cohesive force for the possibility of moving beyond mechanistic and state-guided liberalism and the ethics and falsifications of socialism. This understanding is also distinct from explanations in terms of the "end of ideology" thesis and "ideologically-free" considerations. It seems rather plausible that some American intellectuals, in the period between their predominant leftist orientation in the 1930s and their evasion to the right especially in the 1950s, were searching for a centrist positioning regarding politics in the 1940s, in their preferences for "…the familiar to the unknown…, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant" (Oakeshott 1991, 48). This description signifies the return to the virtue of moderation and the search for Schlesinger's "vital center". But, for most intellectuals and political activists of the period, that was not the case. Both critics and defenders of the new conservative orientation in the United States amassed them in various factions of radicals: anti-statist, anti-Semitic and anti-New Deal paleo-conservatives, anti-Great Society, communitarian and religious social conservatives in the aftermath of the 1960s (Cooper 2017, 19-20). During the Cold War period, the prevalent concerns of neoconservatives were anti-isolationism, Americanism and anti-communism. The ideological agenda of neoconservatism gathered momentum and eventually absorbed other complementary conservative obsessions, constituting the noisiest voice of the Cold War ideological spectrum.

Ideological syncretism stands for the effort of transgressing the shortcomings of rigid ideological indoctrinations which fascinated and obscured the political views of most intellectuals in the interwar period. The disastrous political and economic outcomes and the atrocities of the Stalinist and Nazi totalitarian regimes in Europe, on the one hand, and the all-encompassing social reformism of the progressive orientation directed towards the domestication of liberal capitalism, which eventually succeeded during the implementation of New Deal administrative policies in the United States, on the other, were the most determinant factors for rethinking the political. The reactions against the postwar status-quo in world and domestic politics were essentially elitist, aiming either at moving towards post-ideological thinking, or dismantling political ideologies altogether. Shared by a community of individualistic elites, these basic attitudes were only ambiguously accepted by those intellectuals who upheld them as conservative in spirit. Indeed, at the turn of the 1940s, the most important representatives of these elites followed no-party politics, defended moderation between political extremes and emphasized freedom of conscience (Scruton 2001, 4-11). Even if many elites had adhered either to utopian socialism or to radical communism in the previous decade, they abandoned their credo immediately after discovering that they had been betrayed, deceived and naïve. Yet, they seemed to take a conservative path by returning to traditional wisdom or - at least some of them - absorbing the passionate attitude about politics they had lost when their utopianism had faded away. "The source of conservatism is a natural attitude that combines the enjoyment of something valued with the fear of losing it" (Kekes 1998, 5).

By and large, the features of the new elitist type of conservative ethos were pluralism (the centrist option between the extreme values of absolutism and relativism), skepticism (the middle term between rationalism and fideism), traditionalism (the middle term between social authoritarianism and rough individualism), and pessimism (as via media between optimism and fatalism) (Kekes 1998, 190). Beyond this crude generalization of the conservative mindset in the postwar period, there were manifest antagonistic options - elitist as well - among individuals who, in the aftermath of the late 1950s, split into mainstream conservatives and ideologically-free thinkers. While some self-declared conservatives (Buckley, Meyer) radically criticized the New Left, the politics of desegregation, the civil rights movement, consumerism and the overall legislation of the 1960s, mainly because of their destructive character for traditional values, other intellectuals who repeatedly refused the conservative categorization defended social movements for reasons pertaining to their previous socialist affiliation and residual beliefs (Bell, Glazer, Lipset). Even if the latter group shared some conservative tenets with the neoconservatives, due to the further crystallization of the movement in the late 1950s, they preferred a non-ideological positioning. The ideological metamorphosis experienced by some discontented elites from utopian socialist left to soft conservative right was not the singular rule of behavior; there were more sophisticated ideological transformations escaping the fascination of narratives for radical conversions. For instance, before turning into a Burkean conservative in the postwar era, Walter Lippmann had traversed an intricate ideological route, from a staunch progressive in the 1920s to embracing liberal realism in the 1930s (Lacey 2016, 14). Such convolutions towards the Cold War conservatism have commonly characterized the rise of the first two neoconservative generations to the mainstream ideological milieu in the United States. In the process of ideological conversions, most looming conservatives have experienced frustration, anger and a general psychological state of disbelief in regard to real benefits stemming for ideological affiliations.

Scorning the Left: puzzling politics and the American pre-conservative elites in the 1930s

When pursuing their educational goals in the 1930s in New York City, some idealist and utopian leftist intellectuals had no idea that no more than twenty years later, they would return to the basic tenets of traditional conservatism they had despised and rejected as obsolete, frozen and boring. Earlier, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the true conservatives (Louis Mencken, George Santayana, Albert Jay Nock, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More) were leading figures of cultural and humanistic conservatism, in their defense of genuine American traditions; their insistence on the importance of preserving the value of individualism as a landmark of political culture in the United States put them in disagreement with Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies of social conformity (Henrie 2004, 4). Who would have thought that, twenty years after, they would resurrect the doctrine of Americanism, albeit for different reasons and with distinct meanings? Moreover, who would have dared to think that, obsessively after 1960, the doctrine of American exceptionalism would be the dominant ideology of radical neoconservatives and the main catalyst for the augmentation of ideological controversies? Subsequently, is it legitimate to infer that the doctrine of American exceptionalism has stood as the guiding topic of the conservative mindset? Answering these questions, although challenging and expressive, requires a quite distinct approach from the present narrative of the conservative agenda.

Returning to the triggering context of the academic milieu surrounding the City College of New York, where middle class and poor young students completed their education, under the impact of both academics and their own social background, many students (Kristol, Bell, Lipset, Glazer, Moynihan and others) opted for a leftist ideological orientation. Their story was carved in the celebrated "Alcove 1" (the cafeteria where socialists, utopians and Trotskyists met and formed a more or less unitary division) and "Alcove 2" (the meeting place of the radical, communist and Stalinist side of the left) (Fukuyama 2006, 15; Jumonville 1991; Friedman 2005). All of them bore a common grudge against cultural elitism, old conservatism and liberal capitalism in the late 1920s until mid-1930s. At the end of the 1930s, they generally formed the so-called "Anticommunist Left", and fiercely condemned utopianism, social engineering and totalitarianism, in the aftermath of their disenchantment with the Stalinist Soviet Union. However, what has really happened in the course of approximately fifteen years is a matter of mysterious ideological transfiguration that fascinated political scientists and intellectual historians alike.

As a matter of fact, there were some diffuse conceptions which the young American leftists and cultural conservatives shared in the 1930s. In his salient book Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, published in 1925, Karl Mannheim identified three fundamental prerequisites which substantially informed the conservative mindset of the age: i) the conservatives questioned the premises of rationalism, moralism and epistemic universalism of both liberal and democratic reformers; ii) they sympathetically identified themselves with the "threatened social classes" (i.e., with aristocracy in the nineteenth century and with the working classes in the first decades of the twentieth century), and iii) there was a markedly conservative inclination to think about individuals in terms of their social backgrounds and historical contexts (Gottfried 2007, 33-35). Of the three tenets of conservative ideology at the beginning of the twentieth century, I would argue that the last two were also latently endorsed by the young utopian leftists. In other words, one might notice the incipient, albeit subliminal, conservative tone in the ideological orientation of American leftists in the 1930s.

The American intellectuals who denied leftism in the postwar period had shared utopian and socialist views rather than outright activist and communist propaganda, together with ideological fascination for the exiled Soviet activist Leon Trotsky. When the excommunicated Soviet leader published his An Open Letter to American Intellectuals in the leftist newspaper Modern Monthly, in 1934, the circle of New York leftist intellectuals enthusiastically committed themselves to the cause of "Trotskyism" as a form of protest towards the repressive and totalitarian agenda of Stalinism. One prominent intellectual of the time, Seymour Martin Lipset, was a case in point (Heilbrunn 2004, 112). Most of them had been affiliated to minor leftist organizations and associations and published ideologically-driven papers. Later, when many abandoned explicit political activism and dedicated themselves almost exclusively to educational purposes and writing, reminding of interwar English Tories who attacked the leftists by resorting to "a battle of books" (Green 2002, 135), severe criticism called them "imposters – renegade Trotskyists who have changed their outward political coloration several times but remain intent on an utopian, permanent revolution that expands US power…" (Heilbrunn 2004, 107).

No political event in particular caused the abrupt transmutation of the bewitched American intellectuals in the 1930s; instead, their transfiguration happened as they gradually grew disenchanted with the crude, repressive and totalitarian manifestations of Soviet Stalinism. They might have experienced disorientation and desolation in confronting the cynicism, hypocrisy and distortions of communism, in contrast to the maculate conceptions of their ideological dreams. The moment that decisively scattered all illusions concerning the 'real face' of communist propaganda was the 1939 treacherous and diabolical pact between Hitler and Stalin. The same year, another important supporter of socialist left in the United States, Sidney Hook, stirred a group of 140 American intellectuals to sign a public appeal for the purpose of denouncing the "fantastic falsehood" of the Soviet system and warning against the contagious effect of "totalitarian ideas" upon the United States institutions and political practices (Friedman 2005, 46-47). They feared not only the contamination of traditional political and public institutions, but also the infectious potential of these ideas upon political rationality and critical thinking. During the 1940s, many disappointed intellectuals who were deceived by the ideological mystifications of the left suffered from the syndrome of a rather "silent transition" to prudent conservatism. At the end of the decade, and especially in the period 1948-1955, both the need to be excoriated of the last traces recalling their leftist past and the critical opposition to the outcomes of Franklin D. Roosevelt's social liberalism prompted some individual endeavors to writing books and articulating amateurish ideas designed to guide domestic public opinion onto a new path, admixing anti-statism, individualism and Americanism (Schoenwald 2001, 16-17). The 'Americanism ingredient' of the new orientation also proved to be mostly problematic: in the transitory process from the intellectuals' former Marxist education to its complete repudiation (Gerson 1997, 192), from endorsing an original version of American left to promoting an imperialist and exceptionalist neoconservative option, there had been no ostensibly surmountable gap, except for what I called "ideological syncretism". There is something more - I believe - than the elementary distinctions between dispassionate, disenchanted and purely lucid intellectuals falling into ideologically-free intellectualism, on the one hand, and radical, fanatical and mystical intellectuals preaching the new age of American domination in the world, on the other. On the road to unilateralism, the doctrine of preemption and the "Americanization" of the world, the story of formerly leftist American intellectuals in the 1950s attempted to reveal a more complex reality.

Defecting to the Right: 'certainty politics' and the birth of neoconservatism in the 1950s

Transgressing the ideological turmoil of the interwar period and the Second World War, the ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union (i.e., the Cold War) brought about a non-ambiguous combat between two radically different options - a geopolitical state of affairs which I would designate as "certainty politics" - which further divided the ideological corridors in the United States and complicated the political spectra of doctrinal affiliations. Ordinarily known under the indefinite and rather collective denomination of "neoconservatism", one of these new ideological strands was actually a disorderly composition of multiple factions aiming to gain authoritative voice and ideological recognition as fresh expressions of a new approach to politics. As for its past, "the key principles of neoconservatism… [were] deeply rooted in a variety of American traditions" (Fukuyama 2006, 13).

Overcoming the genealogical simplification of the main conservative strains of thought which divided the Burkean-traditional conservatives from Tocquevillian neoconservatives (Wolfson 2004, 32-48), the ideological options of the mid-1950s were much more complex, insulating traditionalists (Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter, Peter Viereck), from anti-statists (Max Eastman, Frank Meyer), libertarians (Milton Friedman, Frank Chodorov), and all of them from seemingly ideologically-free thinkers, also known as "Americanists" (Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour M. Lipset) (Friedman 2005, 85). The above-mentioned disconnected camps tailored the multifaceted editorial policy of the National Review; moreover, in the early 1960s, at Commentary, there was no unique and non-equivocal political stance (e.g., leftist, centrist or right-oriented), but rather the "amalgam of the three" (Abrams 2010, 53). In statu nascendi, the fact that the so-called neoconservatives were depicted as defiant towards the old conservative legacy (i.e., the divine intent, the Tory England, the Old South, laissez-faire capitalism) (Dorrien 2004), and called "Trotsky's orphans" (Massing 1987, 18-22), while also criticized for leftist nostalgia considering their ambivalent positioning towards the Soviet threat (Nash 1999), pointed to contrasting, confusing and muddled complexity with regard to the past heritage and structural composition of the new ideological movement.

Some scholars argued that the crucial year marking full consistency of the movement was 1953 when new conservative aspirations were visible in Russell Kirk's work The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Santayana, Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History, Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community and Whittaker Chambers's Witness (Schoenwald 2001, 21). The difficulty of establishing solid ideological landmarks and delineating a homogenous framework within the core doctrine of neoconservatism in the period between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s stemmed also from complicated conceptualizations of the political. Following the "journalism period" of the 1950s (Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, National Review, American Spectator, American Enterprise, Public Opinion, Weekly Standard, Policy Review), the neoconservative intellectual, moral and academic education in the 1960s and 1970s was mentored by the outstanding figures of Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss, whose disciples occupied important official positions during the administrations of Reagan and Bush Sr. (Halper and Clarke 2004, 60-62).

Thus, the ideological syncretism and moral confusion of the interwar period gave way, in the postwar period, to ideological and moral assertiveness. The discontinuous, muddled and self-referential evolution of political thinking has transformed the neoconservative doctrine both into "a jungle of twisted thoughts and strange growths" (Dean 2006, xxxix) and a mere state of mind (Wilson 1951; Kirk 1953). Accordingly, the psychological profile of the neoconservative was centred on authoritarianism (i.e., order, distrust of change, state power) and dogmatism (i.e., intolerance of ambiguity, mental rigidity, cognitive closure) (Ryan and Switzer 2009, 153-157), features which would decisively impede upon the assertive character, intransigent approach and uncompromising attitude of most young neoconservatives of the 1950s, and which could bear a descriptive function for their search of Cold War "certainty politics".

In fact, there was no explicit neoconservative awareness as far as their new ideological commitment was concerned. Even the term "neoconservative" was belatedly used in the early 1970s by Michael Harrington, in Dissent Magazine, to point at Cold War socialists (Sidney Hook), ex-socialist intellectuals (Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol), and new left refugees (Norman Podhoretz, Richard Neuhaus) (Dorrien 2004, 7). Despite the new identity noted by Russell Kirk in his 1953 salient work, the circle of ex-leftists did not constitute a homogenous and straight-forward looking orientation, but rather a chaotic crowd of dispersed and conflicting voices. Numerous events are exemplary for the ideological battles of the 1950s and 1960s: Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter dismissed the publication National Review for its radicalism and called for moderation; James Burnham seemed "a man in permanent apocalypsis" (Schlesinger Jr. 1953, 17) because of his refusal to abandon the leftist extremist style of thinking about politics; Norman Podhoretz denounced the American Cold War political culture of appeasement and negotiations as "Finlandization", reminding of Finland's tactics in confronting the Russian enemy (Dorrien 2004, 13); Irving Kristol's The Public Interest attacked egalitarian liberalism, progressive reformism and the welfare state practices of social engineering; Frank Meyer opposed the neoconservative orientations of Kirk and Rossiter, while William Buckley embodied the Jacobin father of (them all) "contrarian and revolutionary" conservatives (Lacey 2016, 235-236). Grosso modo, the postwar American neoconservatives until the late 1970s rejected "McGovernism" (i.e., culture of appeasement, liberal guilt, antiwar sentiment) and slowly but firmly moved towards embracing an imperialist agenda (i.e., the export of American values and rejection of containment, appeasement, détente, rapprochement) (Ryan and Switzer 2009, 165-166). Culturally, they generally defended expressive individualism to the detriment of traditional utilitarianism, moving towards a post-materialist understanding of politics and society (Collins 2007, 152). Politically, the very expression of the neoconservative orientation was the Sharon Statement, a document adopted in 1960 by young conservatives which "fused together traditionalism, libertarianism and anticommunism" (Friedman 2005, 94), and designed to popularize the conservative trend among students and to counterbalance widespread leftist opinions which, two years later, in 1962, were incorporated in the Port Huron Statement.

There were also consensual efforts directed towards overcoming rigid ideological delineations and merely sterile confrontations. In mass-media, Frank Chodorov started to publish the four-page monthly newsletter Analysis, in 1944, which later merged with the publication Human Events, influencing the early doctrinaires of neoconservatism, William Buckley and Medford Stanton Evans, and continuing the markedly elitist, individualist and libertarian spirit endorsed by the "superfluous man", Alfred Jay Nock, in The Freeman (Nash 2008, 17-23). In domestic politics, Frank Meyer and William Buckley stood for "fusionism" (i.e., the harmonization of individual freedom with tradition, or the conciliation between libertarians and conservatives) (Friedman 2005, 56). In the field of international politics, the neoconservative mindset largely supported a comprehensive ideological reconstruction of anti-collectivism, anti-Stalinism, anticommunism and anti-totalitarianism, in order to make room for non-isolationist internationalism and reinterpretation of laissez-faire capitalism (Himmelstein 1989, 28-62). In economy, Milton Friedman, one of the founding fathers of Chicago School of Economics, tried to move beyond the sordid disputes between Keynesians and anti-Keynesians and insisted for the implementation of the monetarist doctrine, while denying interventionist policies on price control (Delong 2007, 108-115). Not only with reference to Milton Friedman's works on economics, but also pointing at Daniel Bell's post-ideological conception, which seemed to defend professionalized approach to political matters to the detriment of ideologically-driven perspectives formulated by theorists, the mark "pragmatization of conservatism" (Friedman 2005, 51; Lacey 2016, 8-9) aimed at softening the neoconservative assertiveness and saving the utilitarian dimension of politics.

Postulating either ideological syncretism or ideologically-free thinking does not fully elucidate about the radical transfiguration of neoconservatives in the 1940s. Instead - I dare say - it was precisely disillusionment and historical trauma - and not ideological concerns - which precipitately prompted their conversion from interwar utopianism to postwar certainty politics. This is the reason why it is historically inaccurate, ideologically impossible and factually improbable to recollect in one coherent narrative the multiple stories of early neoconservatives in the United States. In the sense of their inclination towards ideological syncretism, the term neoconservative could be descriptive for a synthetic political understanding of the historical period in terms of overcoming narrow-sided visions and confronting new historical contexts. In the sense of their abdication from ideological thinking altogether, neoconservatism could stand for the attempt to refurbish the understanding of politics. Whatever the case, the neoconservative equivocations in coping with both situational conflicts and consensual efforts eventually faded away once they found the common dynamo: Americanism.

Hard-line Americanism: muscular politics and the apogee of neoconservatism in the post-Reagan era

"We're [all] Americans", the political icon of the neoconservatives in the 1960s, Barry Goldwater, used to say (Cassidy 1988, 106). The strategy of postulating a far-reaching and all-inclusive concept might seem an arguable and convenient maneuver to be used for the purpose of avoiding contradictions, paradoxes and severe exceptions. But, regarding the concept of "Americanism", that was not the case: the new symbolic idol could not only render all ideological disputes obsolete, but also spared a bunch of American public intellectuals from hindrance regarding a questionable recent past and restored their public credibility. In my view, this consideration stands as a complementary argument for the ideological pragmatism of postwar neoconservatives. The idea that a common creed could unify some public figures who had been betrayed in their leftist utopianism in the interwar period and who would experience a state of redemption in the postwar period became the most honorable compromise, subtending sterile ideological fights and eventually persuading them to perform again in the political arena. In their views, there was something more substantial than ideological purism and political idealism: the return to "common-sense" and "credible politics" became their new credo (Lowndes 2008, 155). Manipulating the new ideological context with sagacity, the neoconservatives gradually achieved "homogeneity and cohesion" and energetically searched for "absorption and maximalism". Ultimately, these accomplishments explain their strength and success (Medvetz 2006, 344).

The Cold War bipolar division in world politics brought about the perfect ideological valve for the escape of bewildered neoconservatives in the 1950s. Their self-enchantment with Americanism ignited a forceful public propaganda against what energetic neoconservatives perceived as the ominous characteristics aiming to destroy the American civilization and way of life: collectivism, communism, totalitarianism and suppression of individualism. Undoubtedly, the immature neoconservative movement of the period contributed a great deal to the Second Red Scare witch-hunting campaign conducted by the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy and precisely centered on the intransigent defense of Americanism. Partly because of their vehement opposition to the post-New Deal effects on the consolidation of the administrative state and welfare social policies, the neoconservative supporters have started to be associated with the right wing of the Republican Party's opposition to social liberalism. The neoconservative aegis of traditional American values under the 'flag' of Americanism rhetoric divided, once again, the moderates from the unyielding fellows. For instance, in the context of the 1960s zealous Civil Rights movement, while Reinhold Niebuhr turned to social conservatism due to his prevalent interest for the concept of social justice (Lacey 2016, 15), the indefatigable John Birch Society strongly denounced any form of anti-individualism, redistributive policies and affirmative intervention of the state in promoting social rights (Skocpol and Williamson 2012, 33). On different grounds, the philosopher and mentor of neoconservatism, Leo Strauss, received wide recognition both as the most profound successor of modern traditional conservatism centered on the eulogy of Western values (De Jong 2020, ix) and as prominent representative of the "Intransigent Right" tetrad, alongside Schmitt, Oakeshott and Hayek (Anderson 2005, 3-28).

The ascension of Ronald Reagan to presidency in the early 1980s represented the climax of the neoconservatives' persuading abilities and electoral success. In the next decade and beyond, the geopolitical agenda of neoconservatism has become more and more assertive, from the "Americanization" of the world at the end of the Cold War era and the rejuvenation of American exceptionalism, to the doctrine of preemption, unilateralism and, more recently, war on terrorism. The dissolution of the Cold War ideological rival of the United States brought about the necessity of rethinking the future of large scale politics and recalibrating the role of the United States in world affairs. However, the American ideological conservative thinking at the end of the Cold War postulated one lucid conclusion and one compromising prospect: the Kirkpatrick doctrine, according to which the totalitarian world proved to be immune to democratization and liberalization, and the prospective Krauthammer doctrine, according to which the future of a peaceful world would be dependent on the salient role of one superpower assisted by its allies, respectively (Ryan 2010, 11-16). This latter compromising prospect came to be unofficially identified with the Wolfowitz doctrine and has been the major focus of neoconservative ideological impetuses since the 1990s.

The doctrine of globalization seemed to be a comprehensive substitute for traditional ways of thinking about politics in Schmittian terms. A global world conceived according to the guiding principles of multilateralism and international law stimulated the neoconservative rejuvenation of American exceptionalism as the exemplary source of inspiration for the globalist provisions. That was the reason why globalization was alternatively called the "Americanization of the world" (Taylor 2000, 49-70). This time, Americanism has expanded its meanings in order to become the very representation of peaceful and multilateral global design, beyond its limitative and merely oppositional connotation towards the Soviet totalitarian, collectivistic and repressive model of thinking about politics. However, it was the economic paradigm that has become pivotal in the collective imagery associated to globalization: in this respect, the neoliberal doctrine aimed at enforcing the neoconservative and libertarian extolments of free markets and accommodating private enterprise to the administrative and regulative principles of social liberalism. This compromising approach prompted the neoconservative criticism towards the neoliberal understanding of free market globalism: they accused Clinton's presidency of being "reactive and ad-hoc" (Robin 2018, 212), instead of adopting a more assertive, proactive and strategic positioning.

Assertiveness, hegemonism, militarism and interventionism were the most common denominators of the neoconservative movement at its height. The third generation of neoconservatives announced - through one of its most vocal leaders, Paul Wolfowitz -  "the benevolent domination by one power", which he equated with "global leadership" (Tyler 1992) and US outright imperialism. Certainty politics of the Cold War era became 'more certain' and more aggressive during the 1990s neoconservative war-like manoeuvres, belligerent propaganda and "effective diplomacy" (Kagan 2014b), all understood in terms of the United States' unilateral use of force and muscular politics.

By and large, as it was the case in regard to the preeminent concerns of the first two generations of postwar neoconservatives, the hegemonic neoconservative agenda of the third generation has slowly but firmly transformed into "an intellectual problem, a question of identity and purpose" (Kagan 2014a). Moderate liberals and internationalists alike deconstructed the neoconservative mythology by rendering it to insidious, aggressive and persuasive propaganda in the service of the highly questionable hegemonic conduct of the United States in foreign policy. Criticized as "imperialistic, chauvinistic, militaristic, and hypocritical", the American neoconservative infatuation with hard power politics was grounded on "excessive idealism, blinding self-righteousness, utopianism, hubris, militarism and overweening ambition" (Kagan 2008). The critically dismissive labelling of the neoconservative thinking in the field of international politics as "the hallowed tradition" (Bacevich 2012, 70), from John Quincy Adams, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr to the present-day neoconservative 'hawks', has been associated with post-Eisenhower and Nixon international agendas of the Republican Party. However - as neoconservatives repeatedly contended - this criticism is rather inaccurate and could be easily thwarted by historical facts: for instance, those who fiercely denounce the Bush Doctrine and the post-Baghdad narrative (Kagan and Kristol 2002) forget that, in the 1990s, the Clinton Democratic administration turned from "containment to regime change" in conducting diplomatic relations with unstable political regimes.

In realist terms - neoconservatives maintain - a reflective analysis of the last century's trends in international politics reveal that, following two short periods of illusory idealism (i.e., the Wilsonian liberal internationalism of the 1920s and the political culture of appeasement and international legalism of the 1930s), the post-war strong realism of the Cold War era cut the world order in two entities: the camp of 'armed liberalism' and the camp of totalitarianism. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the totalitarian world, a new promise of universal liberalism and global democracy emerged. The 'end of history' thesis and the utopian promises of a peaceful global world order became the ideological targets of neoconservatives. According to the neoconservative critique, the fallacy of Fukuyama's end of history pronouncement and the optimistic determinism of the 1990s rested on the naïve presumption that the globalization of the liberal democracy model could be possible.

This was the breaking point of the neoconservative ideology: as the recently 'returned' history has dramatically revealed, resurgent strong nationalisms and the ascent of Russia, China, India, Iran and radical Islam to global power awakened liberal internationalists from their 'dogmatic slumber'. Accordingly, this is the point of no return for the neoconservative insistence on American assertiveness in world politics. In 1996, during the preparations for the inauguration of one of the most militant neoconservative pulpits, Project for the New American Century, Robert Kagan and William Kristol non-equivocally expressed their views concerning the new concept of power: in their words, a refreshing American foreign policy should stand for a "benign global hegemony", based on "military supremacy and moral confidence", to the detriment of "isolationism, neo-isolationism, tepid consensus, and Kissinger-type realism" (Kristol and Kagan 1996). The false belief that transition from ‘hard’ to ‘soft power’ (Nye 2002), which was tantamount to the shift from geopolitics to geo-economics, would bring about the final victory of liberalism and democracy was pure callowness. In fact, Joseph Nye himself amended his early views by stating that "the rise of the rest" - and not the ascension of Russia and China only, or American declinism - would shape the world future (Nye 2013).

The 9/11 catastrophic events not only confirmed the neoconservative apprehensions regarding the radicalization of Islamic terrorism, but also marked the complete overturn of benign and peaceful Americanization of the global world in the context of self-aggrandizing, assertive and belligerent American unilateralism. Neoconservatives bolstered the war-on-terror Bush Jr.'s agenda and strongly endorsed militarism, power politics and aggressiveness in foreign affairs. Defending the American hegemonic power, machtpolitik and unilateral decision-making strategies, neoconservatives reversed the traditional conservative dogma of 'the West is best' with the formula 'the West is us'. For many critics, in light of recent American actions in foreign affairs culminating with George W. Bush's strategy of fighting terrorism and the neoconservative supportive rhetoric, the lofty concept of American exceptionalism should be replaced by the arrogant attitude of American exemptionalism. Because of their triumphalist plea for the American belligerent temperament, superficial categorizations, coercive approach, non-cooperation and unilateralism, neoconservatives were accused of disparaging the United Nations, ignoring UN peacekeeping, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and dismissing dialogue and partnership with the European Union (Keohane 2012).

In the aftermath of George W. Bush's presidential administrations, the core doctrine of neoconservatism in the United States has constantly declined and placed under critical scrutiny. The conservatives themselves might have experienced deep confusions when remarking essential contradictions between the original doctrine of conservatism and the neoconservative way, non-equivocally characterized as "adventurous, fanatical, populist, ideological" (Robin 2011, 43). With a major focus on reclaiming secular libertarianism and moral social conservatism (Skocpol and Williamson 2012, 35), the Tea Party's attempts to resume the neoconservative spirit of the 1990s and early 2000s were rather modest. But there is a great deal to reflect upon recent and possibly future (neo)conservative endeavors in the new century.

9. CODA: POST-TRUTH POLITICS, POPULISM, ANARCHISM, AND THE DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF IDEOLOGICAL THINKING

These concluding remarks were conceived in the midst of Coronavirus pandemic times and high civil unrest, uncharacteristic and uneven events in recent American history. However, both phenomena stand for an in-depth interrogation about past and prospects of ideological thinking, as both ignite reflection upon the ruination of one fundamental lesson of basic logic which I will expose as a matter of choice as deliberate concluding remarks.

The disturbing pandemic crisis gravely affecting the American nation serves as an auspicious pretext for revisiting the logical principle of the excluded middle. In other words, as present time American ideological attitudes reveal, this afterthought is prompted either by the populist approach that addresses the expectations of popular masses at large based on a peculiar type of sovereigntism, or by the participatory noncompliance based on a principled and deliberately anarchic opposition to any form of authority. According to the above-mentioned law of logic, the middle-ground ideological stance does not seem to exist. It would mean that rationality and moderation which usually validate the middle ground, the compromising consensus and the consistency of reasonable arguments had lost their persuasive power. My contention is that, in the field of political thought, traditional ideologies have precisely and consistently saturated the logical space of the middle term and virtually eliminated any propensity towards nihilism and polarization of political thinking in the United States. What I would term camouflaged ideological denial has been the first disenfranchising attitude in regard to ideological commitment by means of nihilist approaches.

On the axis of camouflaged ideological denial, the above-mentioned extremities of populism and anarchism are referential to nihilistic attitudes which still preserve modes of rational commitments, albeit in idiosyncratic tones. At one extremity, populism usually endorses either a peculiar interpretation of right-wing conservatism or an utopian seduction towards 'undifferentiated majorities' and explicitly (ab)uses the concept of sovereignty by distortion. Still, populism has nothing to do with both ideological conservatism and utopian socialism, as it is also obvious that populism willingly manipulates the conventional meanings of sovereignty. Firstly, I have serious doubts in accepting populism as an ideology properly, since all traditional ideologies more or less capitalized on demands of the people. The difference is that populism does not rely on a positive set of values and worldviews, outside the nihilist propaganda that there is nothing else beyond politics on behalf of the forgotten people. Secondly, populism deliberately dismantles the substantial content of sovereignty of the people concept, simply because of reversing the distinction between auctoritas and potestas. According to the upside-down interpretation of populists, it is not the power (i.e., potestas) of the people (i.e., sovereignty) that confers legitimacy (i.e., auctoritas) of populist regimes/ leaders, but, to the contrary, populist power is unquestionably claimed on the basis of authorization from the people/ authority upon the people. The trivial conduct of populists rests upon exploiting the ideological vacuum and taking the opportunity to assert its momentousness based on conjectural, pragmatic, and ultimately cynical reasons. As I have contemplated upon the populist tenets of the current American presidential administration, it is striking that one could not precisely pinpoint the sources of President Trump’s ideological legitimacy, because a solid ideological allegiance is conspicuously absent from Trump's populist exhortations. Thus, his 2016 presidential campaign endorsed a false narrative simply because it lacked a coherent ideological view, which is why Make America Great Again has remained a sheer slogan up to this day. By the same token, President Trump's entrepreneurial logic of political discourses - endorsing material success, not ideological values - eschews marked ideological stances of traditional discourses. His language is flamboyant and attributes in the superlative are hallmarks of his statements, while substantive and positive traits are rather obscured by bellicose allegations. Of course, I am not implying that any ideological commitment is valuable as such, but it is preferable to be acquainted with the basic set of ideas guiding governmental political conduct than to have nothing but histrionic rhetoric. At best, President Trump could be associated to a neo-sovereigntist populist, or to a post-modern conservative, in his outright propaganda for the reinvigoration of the lost values of identity and dignity politics undermined by the neoliberal dogma of global prosperity and high-level political corruption (McManus 2020, 16; Fukuyama 2018). Neither the foreseeable nominalization of Joe Biden for the 2020 presidential elections on a Democratic ticket aptly meets public expectations for the rehabilitation of a coherent ideological agenda of federal government. Predominantly centered on restoring unity of highly-divided national passions, the electoral agenda of the Democratic Party unveils the more and more widespread profile of the liberal populist candidate.

At the other extremity of camouflaged ideological denial, there is the anarchic disbelief, political and ideological non-alignment, and outright rebuttal of political power and authority. Albeit nihilistic in nature, oppositional anarchism voluntarily manifests itself as viscerally anti-system oriented, ideologically fragmented, technologically informed, and characteristically driven by dissentient political participation. Oppositional anarchism is essentially suspicious in regard to ideological fixations and, in consequence, aims at unmasking their hidden agenda and purported mystifications. The apprehensive rationality of oppositional anarchism is essentially counter-rationality (i.e., rationality against the grain) in demand of a clean slate in regard to politics. The only positive approach of anarchists to politics resides on the participatory ethos of intransigent protest: in this respect, they overstate the significance of Thoreau's old concept of civil disobedience as a means to reaching higher ends, with a view to authenticating it as the most effective approach to political activism. In so far as anarchic endeavors urge for a systematic regeneration of politics, it remains enthusiastically positive; in so far as anarchists themselves cannot specifically indicate what this transfiguration would be about and how to achieve it, the anti-systemic furor keeps their energetic drives alive but inexorably empty. In simpler words, oppositional anarchists might not be able to indicate what has to be done, but they surely know that something has to be done. To this end, anarchists tend to validate alternative sources and contents of knowledge which are endorsed as accurate and genuine and which overturn and leak mainstream ideological narratives. Mainly through the use of information disseminated within social media, angered anarchic knowledge not only renders ideological rationality obsolete and utterly misleading, but also attempts at stimulating a kind of planetary oppositional consciousness to comply with the dissenting spirit. More recently, the vocabulary of diplomacy coined the concept of citizen diplomacy as a viable channel for spreading the new ideological impetuses in opposition to traditional party means of political agglutination and ideological concord. The main trouble with the hyper-participative energy of oppositional anarchism is utter fragmentation: when consistently articulated, these movements advocate issue policies (e.g., militant political agendas of NGOs, economic liberation and equalitarianism of OWS), but, more than most, they result in a myriad of sectional interests and diffuse emotions in an atmosphere of co-shared public enthusiasm. These moderate forms of nihilism fighting traditional ideological rationalism reject middle-term approaches of rational consensus grounded on political formative values and the possibility of ideological development grounded on compromising mechanisms of improvement. It means that the ideological space between self-sufficient populism and unabated oppositional anarchism is either vacuous or simply denied. However, as fashionable versions of ideological disenfranchisement, both stances reveal camouflaged ideological presuppositions, by subverting sovereignty in the case of populism and by dismantling politics altogether in the case of dissenting anarchism.

In addition, the acute civil turmoil generated by the death of Afro-American citizen George Floyd in an incident involving a police officer in Minneapolis - beyond the tragic event as such - had a clarifying effect not only upon formulating an additional challenge to the same regulating principle of logical thinking, but also upon illustrating the severe disenfranchisement of ideological thinking. This time, what I would call extreme ideological polarization is revealed either through Trumpism or through what the President himself called "professional anarchism". Again, the middle term does not seem to exist as a viable alternative and effective response; moreover, both reactive stances mark the step forward from ideological nihilism to polarization through non-ideological aggressiveness.

As populism stands for the moderate disenfranchisement of ideological positioning, Trumpism is the logical step forward towards radical rebuttal of any ideological leaning. First and foremost, Trumpism categorizes the personality pattern of President Donald Trump whose ideological pursuits and political behavior have been consistently and voluntarily deterred by what might be termed apocalyptic leadership. The ways in which the American President has responded in regard to the overall management of both the pandemic crisis and the massive popular protests in the aftermath of George Floyd's death are illustrative for what might be understood as the adamant polarization of ideological options. In context, his whimsical and arbitrary statements about proper curative medicines in fighting the virus, the disastrous strategy of curbing the spread of disease and the anathema on scientific credentials in fighting the new virus are explanatory for Trump's debasement of political rationality. In this case, one could add the overturn of his regular populist conduct in order to embrace messianic overtones, irrational prognostications and equivocal optimism. With reference to his reactive stances in confronting protest disruption and over-escalation of violence resulting from roaring popular discontent with racism, under the impact of George Floyd's death, Trumpism took a belligerent high-profile and macho approach in view to dominating the revolts, instead of looking for appeasing solutions and positive pacification. It seems that, in dealing with both cases, Trumpism stands for the incumbent president's 2020 electoral strategy: on the one hand, the President's routine tendency of tweeting and playfully manipulating information in his defense and/ or to his benefit reveals post-truth approaches to communication and sharing beliefs; on the other, embarking on uncompromising mechanisms of electoral management, through polarization of voting options and all-or-nothing approach of electoral competition, President Trump discloses his utter disbelief in the catchall force of traditional political ideologies. There are rumors according to which President Trump intends to update the supposedly zero-sum game strategy of President Nixon during the political campaign of 1968, in assuming that high polarization of the electorate would work to his benefit. All in all, the trademarks of Trumpist post-truth, post-ideological and closely extremist approach to politics are rampant nationalism and populism, adversity towards global elites, xenophobia and racial hubris, amoralism, anti-internationalism, mythic heroism and agonistic assertiveness (McManus 2020, 173-179).

The basic meaning of ideological polarization remains intact if Trumpism confronts a kindred enemy at the opposite extreme of the ideological spectrum. Against all odds, the right-wing derivative model of Trumpist extremism and its opponent, the radicalized left-wing 'professional anarchism' associated by President Trump with Antifa-type of maneuvers, share some basic agonistic views about politics: first, both stances tend to accredit conspiracy theories, albeit on different grounds; second, both share a post-truth reckoning of world affairs. In the first case, according to President Trump and his adepts, lies are fabricated and manipulated by left-wing liberals and professional anarchists and delivered through fake news corrupted media. Inversely, in the eyes of liberal leftists, advocates of political correctness and anti-system anarchists, untruth is fabricated within government's laboratories of propaganda and has to be decoded by global networks of social media co-shared consciousness. What remains valid in both cases is that, according to the conspiratorial design and understanding of the world, truth is a solid underground affair. Both political attitudes unveil post-truth agendas: while Trumpism mimics right-wing conservative-type of defending political order based on a legitimate reference to supernatural order (see President Trump's theatrical invocation of Bible's authority upon his decision to respond with violence to violent and barbaric mobs), 'professional anarchism' seems less professionalized than suspected, highly fragmented and, in consequence, committed to diverse and sometimes contradictory goals of various component factions (it is probable that principled indecision in regard to clear-cut ideological objectives should be indicative for confusing actions generative of lootings and/ or random violence).

Both camouflaged ideological denial and extreme ideological polarization are perverted responses, rather non-responses to ideological thinking. Lucid logical analysis would reveal these conflicting attitudes to ideological positioning as fundamental traits of post-truth politics, upon which the concluding remarks of this book attempted to elaborate. As it is probably truthful to assert that ideological thinking was the over-simplified approximation of modern aspirations towards certainty and true representations of political realities, the same goes valid in the case of our contemporary post-truth times with its disesteem and suspicion of truth claims propagated through what Lyotard called 'grand meta-narratives', and augmented by a characteristic propensity towards conspiratorial understanding of the world and fake news propaganda in the service of disparaging truth conventions. However, my most basic claim is that it is better to live in a world guided by co-shared and consensus-type of value attachments within clearly articulated ideological arrangements, than to be under the spell of anarchic confusion, or be arrested within the confines of rampant populism. In brief, ideologically-driven rationality and moderation are preferable to anything goes bewildering anarchism and narrow-sided trivial populism. My subsequent thesis is that, with ideological consent resulting from responsible civism and lucid criticism virtually absent, the drives towards irrationality and extremism grow dangerously seductive.

All things considered, the dividing options of populism and anarchism enclose irrelevant ideological bearings. While populism bases its magnetic potential mostly on affective attachments, usually under the spell of a strong charismatic leader, anarchism epitomizes a distinct rationale, usually at odds with status-quo political rationality. These attitudes are not only contrary to each other, but also antithetical to ideological rationality; they are post-truth occurrences of postmodern politics inasmuch as truth claims of traditional ideological rationality are rendered meaningless. One compelling rule of inference postulates that from false premises anything can be concluded. For populists, the real truth rests on what is useful and appealing to the people. For anarchists, truth is misleading propaganda and pure fiction. Anything but consensus-based truth, since both populists and anarchists qualify themselves as 'the other people'. Ultimately, the disenfranchisement of ideological rationality is the logical consequence of post-truth understandings of the world we live in.

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Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introductory notes on the methodology and rationality of inquiring into political development

2. Federalism

Briefing on the ideological fabric of federalism

The road to "bad federation": from the Articles of Confederation to coercive federalism

The "good alternative": anti-federalists and the idea of limited powers

The compromising genius of republican federalism

American politics and the failed experience of confederation

On the appropriateness of "good" or "better", "bad" or "worse" epithets

3. Republicanism

From originalism to revisionism

Confronting federalism in the (post)founding era

Turning democratic and nationalist in the Jacksonian era

From abolitionism to recognition and inclusion

Experiencing incapacity to confront the spoils-system and industrial monopolies

Embracing conservative precepts after the First World War

Loaded republicanism: American ideological militarism in post-war geopolitics

Is republicanism an ideology proper?

4. Nationalism

The tricky avatars of an ideology

The Chosen Nation: on the conceptual brands of American exceptionalism

The Expansionist Nation: Manifest Destiny in nineteenth century America

The Divided Nation: on the Janus-faced dogmas of abolitionism, assimilationism and exclusivism

The Enlightened Nation: the American System, progressivism and the administrative state

The Messianic Nation: Americanism, anti-communism, and the paradigm of self-aggrandizing nationalism

The 'post' incarnations of an ideology

5. Progressivism

The ant and the elephant: on the progressive ideological endeavours

Harassing the enemy: the progressive assault on laissez-faire liberalism, c. 1880s

Determination and self-centeredness: the progressive holistic reformism in the 1900s

Climax and decadence: the progressive excesses, relativism and exhaustion in the 1920s

6. Democracy

The democratic breed of exceptionalism in the United States

Conceptualizing democratic exceptionalism in the United States

Endogenous democratic exceptionalism: popular, nationalist, and egalitarian democracy in the United States

Bridging the breach: the progressive caesura and transition to outward-looking democratic exceptionalism

From self-confidence to cynicism: facets of exogenous democratic exceptionalism in the United States

7. Liberalism

On the entanglements of American liberalism

Individualist and secular liberalism in the founding era

Abolitionist and emancipate liberalism in the Civil War era

Industrialist and capitalist liberalism in the Gilded Age

Welfare state liberalism from New Deal to Great Society

The brand new geopolitical world of neoliberalism

The post-liberal world in the new century

8. Conservatism

The inconsistent tradition: elitism and loathing in the conservative land

Scorning the Left: puzzling politics and the American pre-conservative elites in the 1930s

Defecting to the Right: 'certainty politics' and the birth of neoconservatism in the 1950s

Hard-line Americanism: muscular politics and the apogee of neoconservatism in the post-Reagan era

9. Coda: post-truth politics, populism, anarchism, and the disenfranchisement of ideological thinking

10. Bibliography