What we saw last post is Allan Bloom asserting "modernity" began with three revolutions: English, American and French. I want to continue with this section of "The Closing of the American Mind," this time on pages 160-61:
Americans found little to charm them in the ancien regime in France. Its throne and altar were the very reality of, respectively, the unjust inequality and the prejudice that the American regime was intended to replace in the world. America, they believed, would succeed in its project with relative ease because we began here with the equality of conditions. Americans did not have to kill a king, displace an aristocracy that would stay around and cause trouble, or disestablish a church and perhaps abolish it. But the need to do all this, plus the presence of the Parisian mob, which could not accept the rule of law, prevented the French from attaining the reasonable consensus required for orderly democratic government.
But another view of these events dominated public discussion on the Continent. To some Europeans, the Americans represented an intolerable narrowing of the human horizon, and the price paid for their decent order and prosperity was too high. The French aristocracy had a nobility, brilliance and taste that contrasted sharply with the pettiness and grayness of liberal society's commercial life and motives. The loss of what that aristocracy represented would impoverish the world. More important, the religion that was dismantled could be thought to express the depth and seriousness of life. If the noble and the sacred cannot find serious expression in democracy, its choiceworthiness becomes questionable. These are the arguments, the special pleading of the reactionaries, the disinherited of the ancien regime.
More serious for us are the arguments of the revolutionaries who accepted our principles of freedom and equality. Many believed that we had not thought through these cherished ideals. Can equality really only mean equal opportunity for unequal talents to acquire property? Should shrewdness at acquisition be better rewarded than moral goodness? Can private property and equality sit so easily together when even Plato required communism among equals? Communism or socialism never really made much headway against the respect for private property in the United States. Locke's definition of property suited, and still suits, our tempers perfectly, and Rousseau's critique of it made almost no impression here, although it was and remains very potent in Europe. And freedom for us meant merely acting as one pleases, restricted only by the minimum demands of social existence. We had not adequately understood what really setting laws for ourselves required, nor had we gone beyond the merely negative freedom of satisfying brutish impulsion. As for religion, the domesticated churches in America preserved the superstition of Christianity, overcoming of which was perhaps the key to liberating man. Should a good regime be atheistic, or should it have a civil religion? And, finally, what in the world can we do with the Napoleonic —heroic ambition and military glory—other than ignore or debunk it?
Such were the questions raised on the slaughter-bench of History by the French Revolution, questions that we were not eager to hear. ...
So we see that "modernity" was brought to the world by means of revolutions fought for similar ideals (though not the exact same and in this case the devil may be in the details), first in Great Britain, then America, then in France.
I agree with Bloom that America was lucky that it didn't have "to kill a king, displace an aristocracy that would stay around and cause trouble, or disestablish a church and perhaps abolish it" and that was a large part of why America more successfully implemented the principles of liberal democracy than France did.
Though as Gregg Frazer has noted, the Loyalists in America weren't exactly treated with kid gloves. And as I have noted, the Anglican establishment at the state level was defenestrated. By this time, Americans were already highly suspicious of the Anglican establishment across the ocean. We could only imagine what would have occurred if the Church of England was uniformly established in the American colonies at the time of the American revolution.
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