The return of America’s Puritans The revolutionary spirit can't be tamed

The Puritans are back in business with a vengeance, not least because they can boast of actually having founded the country. The US is still young enough to feel the vibrations of its revolutionary past, in which the God of Puritanism was on the side of subversion. Like all nations born in anti-colonial struggle, America’s origins are insurrectionary. Violence, dissent, anarchic individualism and a suspicion of state authority are thus built into its very fabric, unlike those parts of the world for which there is conservative order on the one hand and rebellion on the other. Anarchic individualism can always be channelled into the free market; but once that market gives way to the transnational corporation, which smacks of the same kind of absolute sovereignty as Church and monarch once did, it isn’t surprising that symptoms of insurrection should break out afresh.

We manage things rather differently over here. Britain was awash with religious ideology in the 17th century, as Puritan and revolutionary forces clashed with the established order and beheaded the king; but that order had had a long time to entrench itself, and so was able to come to terms with these unruly powers. Hence the legendary English talent for compromise and the middle way. Middle-class entrepreneurs began to marry into the nobility, while the sons of dukes were educated side by side with the sons of merchants in the public schools.

In America, by contrast, there was no such traditional order to temper revolutionary energies. This is one reason why ideology loomed so large, another being that you have to think big in order to make a revolution. This is why the French have far too many ideas, at least in the eyes of some of those in Dorking or East Grinstead. They have concepts while we have common sense. But it’s also because aristocrats find ideology vulgar and unnecessary. Gentlemen don’t need to argue about rights and property and political interests. They just feel these things in their bones.

Hence the great quarrel between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke at the turn of the 18th century. Paine was deeply involved in both the French and American revolutions, and in his astonishingly popular The Rights of Man is much taken with abstract concepts of freedom and equality. For his part, Burke counters this seditious stuff with custom, habit, piety, tradition, affection and sentiment. If you have to argue about these things, you’ve already betrayed the fact that you don’t understand them. Ideas break skulls, whereas sentiments bind citizens together. An Irishman from a neglected, half-famished colony had to leap to the defence of aristocratic Britain against revolutionary France, just as the Irish had to write much of the nation’s great literature for it.

You might claim, however, that the British could afford to look askance on the abstractions of Robespierre. After all, they themselves had been through this turmoil of revolutionary ideas themselves over a century earlier, and having come through it and settled down to the more sober business of making money had no great wish to be reminded of it. Besides, if you throw up the barricades yourself, you might teach those below you to do much the same. The era of revolution in America and France is also the time when a new actor — the industrial working class — is about to emerge on the political stage, and throughout the 19th century the middle classes lived in fear of this threat to their very existence.

The contrast between Burke and Paine, tradition and ideology, isn’t as clear-cut as either man seems to think. People nowadays use the word “ideology” to mean a system of abstract ideas, as opposed to a more pragmatic approach to political affairs. I see things as they are, you have ideology and he is a fanatic. But ideology isn’t just about ideas. It’s the invisible colour of everyday life, too close to the eyeball to be objectified. It, too, is a question of habit, instinct, custom and sentiment. In the language of Donald Rumsfeld, it’s a question of unknown knowns — things we know but don’t know we do, because they are built into the very framework of our knowledge. Keir Starmer is quite as ideological as Jeremy Corbyn; it’s just that a lot of his ideas are currently accepted as common sense, whereas a lot of Corbyn’s still have to be argued over. Why is the command economy ideological but the right to private property isn’t? Why is it ideological to be nationalistic but not to be patriotic?

On the whole, advanced capitalism is averse to ideology, which is one of the many aspects of Trump which make him so exceptional. The ideal is for the system to work automatically, without relying on anything as chancy as beliefs. As long as you turn up to work, smash a bare minimum of shop widows and don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe whatever you like. Nobody cares whether you’re a Jain or a Seventh Day Adventist. In fact, nobody even knows what they are. Material interests will always pull rank over visions and principles. Since convictions are a source of conflict, they are generally discouraged. In postmodern culture, convictions are almost equivalent to dogmatism. This is why people say things like “It isn’t necessarily that inequality is being reduced”. They mean that it isn’t being reduced at all, but since that sounds too doctrinaire it’s prudent to add “necessarily”. “It’s like getting worse” is a lot less table-thumping than “It’s getting worse”. Some people in this agnostic climate even have a problem with saying “It’s nine o’clock”.

If you banish ideology, however, the danger is that it will reappear in pathological form, as it is currently doing in the States. We may all be moving back to the 17th century. Men and women don’t just want prosperity and security; they also want recognition. They want to be assured that they are loved and needed, cared about and included. These are not activities at which bureaucratic states and transnational corporations are particularly adept, which is one reason why populism and fascism are on the increase. US Steel can give you wages or supply you with commodities, but they can’t give you meaning. For that you have to turn elsewhere, to sex and sport, snake oil salesmen and aspiring autocrats, crooked preachers and neo-Nazi louts, Hollywood mystics and bent bishops, each of them seeking to out-loony his neighbour. Rampant irrationalism begins to breed at the very heart of technological rationalism. The more reason is reduced to a set of scientific calculations, the more school children are massacred and little green men peer inquisitively in at your bedroom window.

Not long ago, when History was declared to be at an end, the West had rationality while the East had ideology. The question was whether a rather anaemic Western pragmatism and liberalism were tough and resourceful enough to withstand the absolutism of radical Islam, or were they altogether too effete, over-civilised an affair to deal with the likes of Bin Laden. Now, however, the fanatics and barbarians are well and truly within the citadel. As I write, the news comes through that Trump has given the go-ahead for a Jeffrey Epstein Center for Family Values. That’s not true. But in a nation where the line between fact and fantasy becomes ever fainter, it might just happen.