piously insisting on nonviolence, was at first ambivalent about Brown (declaring him to be "well intended" but "misguided, wild, and apparently insane") but eventually brought himself to the Orwellian conclusion that Brown's violence was "a positive moral growth; it is one way to get up to the sublime platform of non-resistance."

After his execution he was widely celebrated in poetry by William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Walt Whitman, among others. The novelist Lydia Maria Child compared him to St. Stephen, Christianity's first martyr.

How could all these high-minded people have been attracted to Brown? Richard J. Ellis probably has it right when he suggests it was Brown's apparent sincerity that captured their imagination. It absolved him of guilt and gave him an air of "authenticity and inner truth." The very fact that his idea of raiding a federal arsenal and forming a guerrilla army had so little chance of success was an indication of its purity and of Brown's selflessness. Courage like that of Brown "charms us," said Emerson, "because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind."

"Sincerity is all in all," wrote Richard Sibbes and John Davenport in 1629, and it was this premise that underlay Anne Hutchinson's determination to expose ministers who (so she suspected) had not undergone a true conversion experience and thus were living according to worldly standards. Brown, whom abolitionist writers often identified with Puritanism, was among the purest of the Puritans because his ideas were unconnected to the world.

Nationally, the abolitionists enjoyed about the same popularity in the 1850s that the Communists enjoyed a century later. The South, however, was not aware of how truly unpopular it was in the North. The Liberator, Garrison's newspaper, had a minuscule circulation there, but excerpts from it were widely reprinted in the southern newspapers as examples of typical Yankee attitudes. This set off a furious overreaction in the South, which ultimately turned northern opinion against it. Thus the great irony that the abolitionists, who had largely failed to rally public opinion to their side in the North, provoked southern defenders of slavery into a polemical offensive that turned northern opinion decisively against them.

First, they tried to argue that slavery was not simply a fact of life but a positive good, good both for the masters and the slaves. This attempt to justify the master-slave relationship as the foundation of the good society directly conflicted with the individualist culture of the North. Second, and to make matters worse, they backed up their arguments with the threat of secession if all else failed. This was the most serious miscalculation, since even conservatives in the North regarded secession as anathema.

When the Southerners made good on their threats by withdrawing from the Union and cannonading a federal fort in one of their "sovereign" states, the war began. The North's stated aim in the war was solely to force the eleven seceding states to rejoin the Union. The sermons of many, perhaps most, ministers in the North stressed the duty of obedience to magistrates, not the sin of slavery. They blamed the coming of the war on the breakdown of authority and on "atheistic"—hence anarchistic—theories of government. For conservative evangelicals in the North, the Union was sacred, and many a "moderate" on the slavery issue became an anti-secession militant. But as the war escalated, grinding up young men at an average rate of 2,995 a week, something grander, more transcendent, was needed to justify the carnage.

The decision swept away the abortion statutes of all fifty states and gave the United States the most liberal abortion policy outside of the Communist world. Unlike the abortion laws enacted in Western Europe, this was the work not of legislatures but of a seven-to-two majority on a court. (One of the dissenters, Justice Byron White, called it “an exercise of raw judicial power.”) It set off a bitter, wide-ranging controversy not only about issues like abortion and euthanasia, but also about the question of what the role of nonelected judges should be in a democracy.

This last question troubles even many supporters of the Court’s decisions. Surveying the “victories” of the Left during the 1970s, the political scientist Michael Walzer notes that most of them were won “in the courts, the media, the school, the civil service—and not in the central arenas of democratic politics.” To Walzer, who supports these changes but is also something of a populist, this is reason for concern: “They reflect the leftism or liberalism of lawyers, judges, federal bureaucrats, professors, school teachers, social workers, journalists, television and screen writers—not the population at large. . . . The left didn’t ‘seize’ power in the years after 1964. It didn’t build stable or lasting movements or create coherent constituencies, let alone control Congress or the presidency.” On the surface, Walzer concedes, the Left did seem to take control in the seventies, thus winning the Gramscian war: “But this was largely an illusion, because so many Americans experienced this ‘left’ culture (and law and administration) as something alien, frightening, or deeply disturbing.” To be sure, they were encouraged in this belief by well-financed, well-coordinated interests. But the reaction “would never have taken on its current dimensions if it didn’t tap into genuine, widespread popular anger and fear.”

Walzer’s analysis helps to explain some of the public reaction to the policies put into place in the 1970s. The policies expressed what the political scientist Hugh Heclo calls “Sixties civics” but they are more accurately associated with the seventies, the time when the new civics worked their way into the educational system. For many Americans, Heclo notes, they were “confusing and difficult to understand”: “For example, Americans were taught that this was a time for promoting more participatory democracy, but they were also taught that unelected judges in the national courts were now to be a powerful force in directing the course of public affairs. They were taught that sex education should be a public responsibility in the schools, but religion should now be regarded as a private concern walled off from public endorsement in the schools.... Older Americans were taught that young people, once applauded for being seen but not heard, should now be recognized as the voices of political conscience, even if their ‘lifestyle’ (a nonjudgmental term becoming popular at the time) seemed to be a threat to traditional morality

Intellectuals on the Left were not the only ones to consider the significance of 9/11. Their conservative counterparts also had some things to say, many of them highly critical of the way the Left was responding. Commentary, the premier neoconservative journal, featured a number of these criticisms. The most ambitious and wide ranging of them was an article in January of 2005 by David Gelernter, entitled “Americanism— and Its Enemies.”

In the article Gelernter defines “Americanism” as “the set of beliefs that are thought to constitute America’s essence and to set it apart; the beliefs that make Americans positive that their nation is superior to all others—morally superior, closer to God.” Americanism is not some sort of “secular” or “civil” religion but “in fact a Judeo-Christian religion; a millenarian religion; a biblical religion.” He traces its origin to the religion of Puritans. After noting the powerful force of Puritanism as a cause of the English Civil Wars and the migration to New England, he adds: “And then it simply disappeared.” Or so it seemed. But “I believe that Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed itself into Americanism.”

...

The polemical part of his article comes near the end, where he implies that those who do not share his laudatory concept of Americanism are therefore anti-American.

Zoar is the home of a communistic society who call themselves “Separatists,” and who founded the village in 1817, and have here become quite wealthy. They originated in Würtemberg, and, like the Harmony Society, the Inspirationists, and others, were dissenters from the Established Church. The Separatists of southern Germany were equivalent to what in New England are called “Come Outers”—protestants against the prevailing religious faith, or, as they would say, lack of faith.

In fact, the Germans make better communists than any other people—unless the Chinese should some day turn their attention to communistic attempts.

What I have seen of these people in California ... leads me to believe that they are well calculated for communistic experiments.