Liberalism is a map whose recurring landmarks include: the establishment of individual rights, the formation of government based on a contract, equality before the law, the protection of private property, and an affirmation of religious and ethical tolerance. This map has at times appeared so utterly dominant in the United States as to create the illusion of being the country's lone ideology. As the political scientist Louis Hartz declared, “there has never been a ‘liberal movement’ or a real ‘liberal party’ in America: we have only had the American Way of Life”. According to Hartz, all major ideological conflict in the USA was an intramural debate between left-versus-right liberals, who might disagree over specific rights (say, the right to gun ownership or the right to healthcare) but never questioned the fundamental existence of individual rights as such. Indeed, even the country's leading poets echoed liberal ideas about the freedom to noninterference, teaching adages like “good fences make good neighbors”. And every American intuitively sensed that the best fences were not made of metal or solid board but of individual rights.

In this way, the United States was imagined as the land of liberalism, its ideological coordinates baked into the very canyons, forests, deserts and highways. Any ideology outside of liberalism's borders (say, socialism or fascism) was deemed un-American, an invasive species. Likewise, forms of racial hierarchy that seemingly flourished in the United States, were classified as anomalous and fringe. Hartz, for instance, suggested that racial hierarchy was mostly limited to the American South, which was the “alien child in a liberal family” that “after the Civil War … fell quickly into oblivion”.

Today no serious scholar of American politics accepts Hartz's breezy dismissal of the South or his attempt to expunge other regions of participation in racism. Instead, Hartz's thesis is interesting not as an empirical truth of social science, but as an artifact of liberal ideology itself. Although Hartz thought of himself as offering value-neutral descriptions of the political topography, he was instead unwittingly retracing and reinforcing the lines of an ideological map.