Being in Britain around the Fourth of July is always an odd experience for an American. It was especially awkward to be at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London a week before the 250th anniversary of US independence.

ARC is a British organization whose massive annual conference – about 4,000 people this year – is styled as a kind of counter-Davos, an international gathering of center-right types including a heavy representation of Americans. Given the timing, various speeches by gracious British hosts praising their American guests’ homeland – and by Americans themselves praising the principles of their revolution against the British two and a half centuries ago – were to be expected. But that didn’t diminish the cognitive dissonance. Quite the contrary: it was conspicuously discordant to hear Americans speak of British tyranny and how our revolution introduced the world to real freedom for the first time, while English aristocrats politely alluded to the Magna Carta and Anglican theologians tried to shame Americans into embracing internationalism.

The point of a creed is to distinguish the orthodox from the heterodox – the saved from the damned

The point of a creed is to distinguish the orthodox from the heterodox – the saved from the damned

There’s a contradiction within what publicists nowadays call America’s “creedal nationalism” school of thought – which subscribes to the notion that America is, at heart, a revolutionary idea, not a people in a particular place. On the one........

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