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The Americanization of the Apocalypse

The murder of thousands of civilians on 11 September 2001 brought apocalyptic thinking to the centre of American politics. At the same time it re-energized beliefs that form part of America’s myth. The Puritans who colonized the country in the seventeenth century viewed themselves as creating a society that would lack the evils of the Old World. Established on universal principles it would serve as a model to all of humankind. For these English colonists, America marked a new beginning in history.

In fact there are no such beginnings, and the sense of bringing into being a new world that has been present in America from the time the first English settlers arrived to the present day is not new or uniquely American. It is a current of the millenarian ferment that passed from medieval chiliasm through the English Revolution. The sense of universal mission that is such a prominent feature of American politics is an outflow from this ancient stream.

The state that emerged from the American war of independence adapted the traditions of English government to the conditions of a struggle for national self-determination and rendered them into the language of universal rights. The American colonists and those who later turned the country into a self-governing republic imagined that governments could be created by an appeal to first principles. In reality both their principles and their belief that history could be started afresh were inheritances from the past.