So molded, ritualized, and controlled, utopianism has served here as elsewhere to diffuse or deflect dissent, or actually to transmute it into a vehicle of socialization. Indeed, it is not too much to see this as ideology’s chief weapon. Ideology represses alternative or oppositional forms when these arise. But it seeks first of all to preempt them, and it does so most effectively by drawing out protest, by actively encouraging the contrast between utopia and the status quo. The method is as old as ideology itself. Any form of protest, utopian or other, threatens society most fundamentally when it calls into question the claims of that society to represent things as they ought to be (by divine right, natural law, the dictates of holy scripture, the forms of reason). Fundamental protest, that is, involves a historicist, relativistic perspective on the claims of ideology. And the immemorial response of ideology, what we might call its instinctive defense, has been to redefine protest in terms of the system, as a complaint about shortcomings from its ideals, or deviations from its myths of self and community. Thus the very act of identifying malfunction becomes an appeal for cohesion. To that end, ideology seeks to focus attention on the distance between vision and fact, theory and practice. To denounce a king through precepts derived from the divine right of kings is to define government itself as monarchical; just as to denounce immoral Christians by contrast with the sacred example of Christ is to Christianize morality. To define injustice through particular violations of free enterprise (or its constituent elements, such as equal opportunity and representative individualism) is to consecrate free enterprise as the just society.

Hence the enormous conservative, restraining power in the alliance between utopia and ideology. It allows the dominant culture not merely to enforce rules of conduct, but to circumscribe the bounds of perception, thought, and desire. And if that culture dominates not by coercion but by consent—if its rituals are not traditional but newly formed, and “new” as well by cultural fiat (new rituals of what Winthrop, Paine, and Reagan called a New People in a New World); if the population, moreover, is broadly heterogeneous (and again, heterogeneous as well by cultural fiat, the self-proclaimed nation of nations, culture of pluralism, and haven of the oppressed and uprooted); if its power, therefore, depends on myths and values to which all levels of society subscribe, especially the excluded or marginalized (since to subscribe thus seems the ready way to power); and if, finally, it is a culture founded on the principles of contract, voluntarism, and self-interest—a culture whose primary unit is the self, and whose primary rites, accordingly, encourage the potentially anarchic doctrine of individualism (with its insidious affinities to individuality and the subversive claims of independent selfhood)—if the culture, that is, combines the conditions of modernization with the principles of liberal democracy, then the need to preclude alternatives a priori, before they can become radical fact, assumes special urgency.

We might say that the American ideology was made to fill that need. It undertakes above all, as a condition of its nurture, to absorb the spirit of protest for social ends; and according to a number of recent critics, it has accomplished this most effectively through its rhetoric of dissent. In this view, America’s classic texts represent the strategies of a triumphant liberal hegemony. Far from subverting the status quo, their diagnostic and prophetic modes attest to the capacities of the dominant culture to absorb alternative forms, to the point of making basic change seem virtually unthinkable, except as apocalypse. This is not at all to minimize their protest.

The point here is not that these classic writers had no quarrel with America, but that they seem to have had nothing but that to quarrel about.

Having adopted the culture’s controlling metaphor—“America” as synonym for human possibility—and having made this tenet of consensus the ground of radical dissent, they redefined radicalism as an affirmation of cultural values. For the metaphor, thus universalized, does not transcend ideology. It portrays the American ideology, as all ideology yearns to be portrayed, in the transcendent colors of utopia. In this sense the antebellum literary renaissance was truly, as Matthiessen said, both American and “the age of Emerson and Whitman”; the conjunction is embodied in The American Scholar and Democratic Vistas, both of which, in the very act of chastising the nation, identify the American future as utopia, and utopia, by extension, as the American Way.

They were produced by a combination of several of the best deterministic random number generators (RNG's), together with three sources of white noise, as well as black noise (from a rap music digital recording).