What distinguishes America? From one view, of course, ours is a middle-class country full of prosaic, bourgeois men and women who all understand themselves to be free beings who work. Orestes Brownson's view, however, is that America is the dialectical reconciliation—someone else might say prudent compromise—between two idealistic extremes. One extreme is the egalitarian idealism of Puritan New England. The other is the love of liberty of the Southern aristocrats. As Alexis de Tocqueville reminds us, each extreme had its founding as European civilization planted itself on our soil in both New England and Virginia. Our two founding regions, Brownson explains, are characterized by "opposite" political tendencies.
The antebellum South, for Brownson, was characterized by personal democracy, that is, government built on the principle of pure individualism. The North—through the dominant influence of New England—was characterized by humanitarian democracy, that is, government built on the principle of egalitarianism. Each of these extremes, by itself, is equally "hostile to civilization" and "capable of sustaining governments only on the principles common to all despotisms." What the South "loses" is "the race," or the truth that all human beings are created both free and equal. It tribally suppresses the truth that rights are universal or "catholic" or encompass us all. In that respect, it dismissed the truth, embodied in Puritan New England (even in its post-Christian manifestations), about the "unity" of the whole human race. What New England loses—as it makes the transcendentalist move from Christianity properly speaking to a kind of pantheism—is "the individual" or the irreducible liberty of each particular person. When Brownson calls the humanitarianism of New England "abolitionism," he means that its theoretical tendency is to obliterate all the distinctions that constitute the truth about who each of us is, made in the image of a personal and relational—or Trinitarian—God.
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