A Shattered Liberal Fragment
Without a genuine feudal past, America was, as the political theorist Louis Hartz once argued, a nation built on a shared belief in liberal ideals rather than on blood and soil. The US military has embodied that idea more visibly than any other. This year, as the United States marks its 250th anniversary, both the idea and the institution built to defend it are under strain.
Surveys by PRRI, Gallup, NBC News, and Pew Research all point in the same direction. Increasingly fewer Americans actually feel proud of their country. In the celebratory year 2026, national pride is slipping, and pessimism about the country’s performance and general direction is rising. In the PRRI survey, 51% of Americans say they are extremely or very proud of being American, down sharply from 82% in 2013. Many other surveys confirm this downward trend in patriotism and national pride.
This decline of shared patriotic values and symbols such as freedom, the American flag, and especially military pride has worried many people. This is because these values have historically been woven together in the fabric of America. They played an important role in the “United” part of the United States. Being proud of the country, paying respect to its service members and veterans, and the sense of a unique American identity have long been one of the few broadly shared traits across party lines, ethnicities, ages, and states.
Apart from these shared patriotic values and symbols, there has historically been little that binds Alabama or Wyoming to, let’s say, California or New York, for instance. Patriotic values and military pride helped build a broadly shared, relatively strong sense of national unity from the nation’s birth in the late 18th century through the Second World War and far into the Cold War.
This is largely the framework of the political theorist Louis Hartz, a mid-twentieth-century Harvard political scholar. Hartz developed a theory to explain why America was ideologically stable and appeared to lack serious ideological debate. His work was influential in shaping ideas about American exceptionalism during the Cold War. Unlike most European nations, Hartz argued in his 1955 work The Liberal Tradition in America, America never had a genuine feudal past. In Europe, liberalism emerged as a revolutionary ideology that was born as an alternative to the Ancien Régime. This French umbrella term describes the hierarchically organized, feudal order with a landed aristocracy, established churches, and all kinds of inherited privileges and dependencies. The European revolutions produced liberalism as a political ideology, but also a wide spectrum of other ideologies such as conservatives and reactionaries defending the old order, and socialists organizing the working class against both feudalism and the new bourgeois liberal order.
America, although born out of a revolution against a colonial power, has never experienced a genuine feudal past. Colonists arriving in America — notably the Founding Fathers but, according to Hartz, basically all of them — were already liberals. They came with classical liberal ideas about individual rights, equality, justice for all, free markets, limited government and so on. In his 1964 book The Founding of New Societies, Hartz and others developed this into the “fragment theory”: societies founded by emigrants from a parent culture become ideological ‘fragments’ from that culture.
Because the emigrants who founded America in the late 18th century left Europe in a period of Enlightenment and the rise of liberal ideas, and well before Europe’s socialist and reactionary movements developed as reactions to liberalism, America became a “liberal fragment” of Europe*.
Compare this to what would happen if Earthlings establish a colony on Mars. The leaders of the colony wouldn’t invent a whole new spectrum of ideologies from scratch. They would rather replicate whatever mix of political ideas existed on Earth at the moment of departure.
Get John Adams Institute’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So because America, according to Hartz, was founded in a purely liberal spirit, the American political debate was mainly about disagreements within liberalism, rather than between liberalism and its rivals. Lacking both a serious domestic ideological debate such as in Europe experienced in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as the absence of a blood-and-soil nationalism, America had to “invent” an alternative story of what defined the nation. This became the pride of liberal values, of freedom and capitalism, and it came with a clear demonstration of the willingness to defend it. This is where the importance of military pride in the US tradition came from. The function of the US military was not to defend a king or a kingdom. Rather, it was there to defend the enlightened principles on which the new nation was founded.
Hartz’s theory is a typical product of the Cold War, which establishes the US as a bulwark of reasonable liberal ideas as opposed to the communist Soviet Union. This provided a strong rationale for the US military to defend Europe and to contain the spread of communism. It is, of course, easy to see where Hartz theory falls short. Its idea of a unique American “liberal consensus” ignores the American history of slavery and race. The civil rights movement, for instance, reached its summit exactly when Hartz developed his fragment theory. Why was a nationwide movement to abolish legalized racial segregation and institutionalized discrimination needed, if America was a nation solely founded on liberal ideas? Hartz’s theory also ignored phenomena like American socialism that existed in American cities in the late 19th century, as well as various anti-liberal traditions, which survived mainly in the American plantation South, and had deep quasi-feudal, hierarchical, and racist structures.
Hartz’s work is still relevant, now that America’s liberal side is increasingly under strain, with the administration withdrawing funding from ‘liberal’ universities and the free press facing unprecedented pressure. It helps us to understand where the main fault lines in American political debates lie. They are exactly along the lines that Hartz introduced. Is the US fundamentally a nation that is unified by liberal ideas or is it something much more contested, something that is unified by — and so also divided by — race, culture, religion and blood-and-soil ethnicity?
Many still believe in the former. Everyone who agrees to America’s founding liberal principles, codified in the Constitution, can be a true American. Others, notably the president himself, think differently. Trump recently again tried to put restrictions on who is automatically guaranteed citizenship after being born in the U.S, after the Supreme Courts ruled an earlier attempt to end birthright citizenship as unconstitutional. , This reveals, among other things, that the president believes that being an American must hold much more than just agreeing to its principles or being born on its soil. This suggests a much narrower kind of nationalism, which is defined not only by the soil one is born on but also by blood, ethnicity, and descent. Ironically, this is exactly one of the main tenets of a feudal society, of which Hartz argued that America had never experienced.
In defense of Hartz, we can say that America clearly has a strong liberal tradition, at least within the Washington Beltway. But there are also other much more anti-liberal American traditions. They have surfaced from the ash heap of history, and have reached momentum within the second Trump administration. 250 years after its founding, America’s liberal fragment, if it has ever existed, has shattered. A battle of ideas and ideologies that America has long postponed has now begun.
All this will also have implications for America’s tradition of military pride. Viewed through Hartz’s lens, the US military embodied a country that is willing and able to defend both itself and its principles. Soldiers defend the nation, but rhetorically they also defended the idea of America. So if the current administration (and maybe even the next one) succeeds in sending America on a less liberal path and a more narrow, even feudalist-inspired version of nationalism, the question becomes what the value of military pride will be. What will the military be for, what should it defend? Will it be a Pete Hegseth-style “warrior ethos” military, with an explicit rejection of universalist and progressive values? Or will those who serve still do it to defend liberal rights, democracy, and pluralism? This is a question that is probably not easily resolved. The tradition that the US military exists to defend American ideals such as freedom, democracy, and justice for all runs deep, and this will make true change slow.
On the other hand, the “liberal consensus” will probably not be easily restored either. America has entered a stage of intense ideologically loaded political debate, and the military will be a part of it. So Hartz leaves us with a useful, if uncomfortable, prediction. He wrote his theory to explain why America was ideologically stable, but that stability has now disappeared. Now, a nation that never had to define itself against a tyrant or a class system will have to do something it has not really done before — decide what it is actually defending and to what future it heads. Whatever this leads to, the US military will, as it always has, end up reflecting the outcome.
*Note that in this context, Hartz’s ‘liberalism’ means the philosophical Enlightenment tradition of individual rights and limited government. This is not the same as today’s American usage of ‘liberal’ as a synonym for the political left.
MAARTEN MUNS is a freelance writer with a background in history and political philosophy.
