16 A government of limited powers
isolationism went deeper than this, and its reappearance in different guises
at different times in America must be seen in the context of an antipathy
towards becoming tainted by that corrupting influence of Europe that Tho-
mas Jefferson feared in the eighteenth century. In other nations that have
a highly developed national consciousness, the process of the evolution of
that consciousness has been slow and gradual. Because, however, America is
a conscious, artificial creation from diverse peoples, at no time in its history
has it been able to enjoy the luxury of allowing feelings of nationality and
community to grow naturally. There has been, throughout most of American
history, a conscious social policy of Americanisation, one might almost say
of indoctrination in the values and ideals of American society. A society that
had to cope with a continuous influx of immigrants of varying nationalities
and creeds could not allow itself to be indifferent to their mode of assimila-
tion into the American way of life, or to allow them to give full rein to the
ideas and customs that they brought from their homelands. America is a free
society, in which the freedom of speech and the press are jealously guarded;
yet the limits of what is socially or politically acceptable are more clearly
drawn, more consciously maintained, than in older, more self-confident socie-
ties. In such a society it was felt that political freedom could be safeguarded
only if the minimum degree of conformity deemed necessary for its survival
was actively maintained. The American political system had to encompass
great diversity within certain boundaries of accepted actions and beliefs. The
fear was that to open the gates too far was to invite the waters of diversity to
overflow the banks of an orderly society. The tensions that this situation cre-
ated can be seen at every level of American political life, for one of the major
functions of the American political system was seen to be its task of ensuring
a minimum uniformity in a situation of potentially explosive diversity.
In the 1960s the Vietnam War disrupted this sense of the need for a single
cultural entity which was ‘America’. The extent of the dissent against the
war, and the blossoming of alternative lifestyles which this dissent fostered,
first in San Francisco and then in other cities in the United States, and fi-
nally the disastrous end to the war, saw the spread of non-conformity on an
unprecedented scale. The attempt to impose a single cultural conformity on
America was no longer possible. The United States had always been com-
posed of people of many different origins, but it had not been recognised as
‘multicultural’. The impact of the Vietnam War and subsequent extensive
Hispanic immigration made multiculturalism a real issue in the United
States. However, the attack on America in September 2001 and the war in
Iraq has complicated the picture. Loyalty to ‘American values’ has once again
become an important political issue. We shall look at legislation such as the
Patriot Act and other security measures and their impact on American so-
ciety.
The United States was a consciously created entity with a revolutionary
tradition. The mere act of travelling to the New World to settle was, for
many of the early Americans, itself an act of rebellion against the rulers and