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In New England, it was quite the opposite. “Order was an obsession” for the Puritan founders. Everything was regulated.

Cotton Mather defined an “honorable” person as one who was “studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified.” These habits have lingered, too.

“Albion’s Seed” makes the brazen case that the tangled roots of America’s restless and contentious spirit can be found in the interplay of the distinctive societies and value systems brought by the British emigrations — the Puritans from East Anglia to New England; the Cavaliers (and their indentured servants) from Sussex and Wessex to Virginia; the Quakers from north-central England to the Delaware River valley; and the Scots-Irish from the borderlands to the Southern hill country.

The values of the Virginia Cavaliers caused the unusual brutality of the American system of Black enslavement.)

Fischer writes of the Scots-Irish: The people of the Southern hill country region “were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of ‘foreigners.’ … In the early 20th century, they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic.”

But how does one prove such an assertion? The only way is through the meticulous accumulation of detail. Over nearly a thousand pages, Fischer describes 22 different patterns of behavior or “folkways” for each of the four cultures — from dress and cooking, to marriage and child-rearing, to governance and criminal justice

These culminate in four distinctive definitions of liberty. Freedom, he writes, “has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with each other.”

Here is the nub of the book: The Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker and Scots-Irish notions of liberty were radically different, but each provided an essential strain of the American idea

The Puritans practiced an “ordered freedom” with the state parceling out liberties: Fishing licenses allowed the freedom to fish

The Scots-Irish were the opposite: Their sense of “natural freedom” was deeply libertarian. You moved to the backcountry so that you could do what you wanted

“Natural liberty was not a reciprocal idea. It did not recognize the right of dissent or disagreement,

Scots-Irish leaders were charismatic — Andrew Jackson was the paragon — and their religion was evangelical,

Honor was valor, a physical trait (among the Puritans and Quakers, honor was spiritual).

The Virginia definition of freedom was complex, contradictory — and remains problematic. It was hierarchical, the freedom to be unequal. “I am an aristocrat,” John Randolph of Roanoke said. “I love liberty; I hate equality.”

Freedom was defined by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t slavery. It was the freedom to enslave. It was a freedom, granted to the plantation masters, to indulge themselves, gamble and debauch.

Over time, this plutocratic libertarianism found natural allies, if strange bedfellows, in the fiercely egalitarian Scots-Irish hill country folk. Neither wanted to be “ruled” by a strong central government. Look at the Covid maps: The regional alliance remains to this day.

The Quakers seem an afterthought, but their migration was larger in size than that of the Puritans or Cavaliers. And their version of liberty seems most amenable today. It was “reciprocal freedom,” based on the golden rule.

American cuisine mirrored the cultures — the Puritans baked (as in beans and pies), the Cavaliers roasted (as in barbecue), the Quakers boiled (as in cream cheese) and the Scots-Irish fried and mashed (as in pancakes and grits)

The Scots-Irish spoke a dialect that predated current British English, and that, because of their notion of freedom, included “an actual antipathy to fixed schemes of grammar and orthography and punctuation.”

Culture is a sticky thing. “To change a culture in any fundamental way,” Fischer writes, “one must transform many things at once.”

Child-rearing was wildly different in the four colonial systems, for example. And, in turn, that affected education, which affected criminal justice and traditions of governance.

For all the challenges confronting him, the president attempted to stay optimistic. As Biden departed the news conference, he offered a thumbs up when asked if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — key Democratic votes — were on board with his $1.75 trillion spending package for families, health care and renewable energy. The president also shrugged off his recent decline in the polls, saying that numbers go up and down

But the policy issues also seemed to fade for Biden when asked about his time Friday with Pope Francis. The president became deeply emotional, his hands appearing to fiddle with the mask he wore as a precaution because of COVID-19.

The president did leave the G-20 with commitments by his fellow leaders on a global minimum tax that would make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes by assigning their profits to countries with low tax rates.

The president met Sunday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose office said the meeting was held in a “positive atmosphere” despite tensions over human rights and Turkey’s purchase of a Russian missile system, among other issues.

Biden heads Monday to the U.N. climate summit in Scotland, where he’ll once again face questions about whether the world’s wealthiest are doing enough to stop the warming of the Earth by moving away from fossil fuels.

And that was just the beginning. Here are five significant ways that America was changed by 9/11.

When President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, he made a case for a new kind of military response; not a targeted air strike on a single training facility or weapons bunker, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror.

When American troops invaded Afghanistan less than a month after September 11th, they were launching what became the longest sustained military campaign in U.S. history. The fight in Afghanistan had support from the American people and the backing of NATO allies to dismantle al Qaeda, crush the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden, the murderous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

in 2015 and in 2016, that figure surpassed 2001 numbers, reaching 127.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 9/11 attacks was that 19 al Qaeda hijackers were not only able to board commercial aircraft with crude weapons but also force their way into the cockpit. It was clear that 9/11 was both a failure of America’s intelligence apparatus to identify the attackers and a failure of airport security systems to stop them. Even though there had already been a handful of high-profile hijackings and bombings of commercial planes, including the tragic 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, security was not a high priority for airlines before 9/11, says Jeffrey Price, a professor of aviation and aerospace science at Metropolitan State University and a noted aviation security expert.

 Yet the ever-present shadow of 9/11, Jenkins says, kept U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere for nearly 20 years.

In addition to an army of blue-uniformed screeners, TSA introduced U.S. travelers to extensive new security protocols. Tickets and photo IDs became required to get through the screening area. Laptop computers and electronics had to be removed from carry-on bags. Shoes were taken off. Liquids were restricted to three-ounce containers. And conventional X-ray machines, which only detected metal objects, were eventually replaced with full-body scanners.

Just four days after the 9/11 attacks, a gunman in Mesa, Arizona went on a shooting rampage. First, he shot and killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner of Indian descent. Sodhi was Sikh, so he wore a turban. The gunman assumed he was Muslim. Minutes later, the gunman shot at another gas station clerk of Lebanese descent, but missed, and then shot through the windows of an Afghan-American family.

Before 9/11, people didn’t have to have a ticket to wander around the airport or wait at the gate. No one checked passengers' IDs before boarding the plane. And the only item people had to remove when passing through security was loose change from their pockets. Price says that most airports didn’t bother running background checks on their employees, and checked baggage was never scanned.

FBI conducted surveillance. Long-standing rules meant to protect Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” were loosened or thrown out in the name of national security.

Congress gave the FBI and NSA new abilities to collect and share data. For example, the Patriot Act gave intelligence agencies the power to search an individual’s library records and internet search history with little judicial oversight. Agents could search a home without notifying the owner, and wiretap a phone line without establishing probable cause.

This law gave the NSA nearly unchecked authorities to eavesdrop on American phone calls, text messages and emails under the premise of targeting foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. 

“If anyone had said this is what they expected the threat to be the day after 9/11, they probably would have been laughed at,” says Sterman. “That would have seemed hopelessly naive.”

In 2019, the Conservatives captured areas like Burnley, in Britain’s postindustrial “red wall,” and Labour polled poorly in Scotland, once another heartland, losing out to the Scottish National Party.

And while the Conservatives lost badly in recent local elections, Labour has made only limited progress, with smaller parties doing well.

He promptly promised that he would resign if he were fined by the police — in contrast to Mr. Johnson, who suffered that fate in April but refused to quit.

In the 2019 general election, parts of England that for decades had voted for Labour switched en masse to the Conservatives, allowing Mr. Johnson to recast the political map just as Donald J. Trump did in the United States in 2016.

Even he accepts that Labour is not yet in a solid, election-winning position.

“It looks like modest progress because it is modest progress,” said Mr. McTernan, while adding that it was still a “massive rebalancing” after the 2019 defeat.

So Labour is hosting a series of town-hall meetings where uncommitted voters are asked what would lure them back to the party.

“It broke my heart in 2019 when I watched communities where I grew up and that I call home turning blue for the first time in history,” said Ms. Nandy, referring to the campaign color used by the Conservatives.

The reason, she thinks, is that politicians spend too much time in London and too little “on people’s own territory having conversations with them about things that matter to them.”

“I don’t think anyone is expecting full policy across the board until the time of the next election,” she said. “A lot of what we need to do is about rebuilding our relationship with the country and setting out our values, and people need to get to know the Labour Party again.”

“I know so many progressives who think that politics is like a football game: If you have a 10-point plan on health and your opponents only have a five-point plan you win 10 to 5,” Mr. McTernan said. “You don’t.”

To succeed, the party needs to convince people like Ged Ennis, the director of a renewable energy company that equipped Burnley College with solar panels. He has voted for Labour and the Conservatives over the years, but opted for the centrist Liberal Democrats in 2019.

“I think what he needs to do is to be brave and to be really clear about what he wants to deliver,

“In a properly functioning education system, that’s giving them really robust messaging about what it means to be a man, they would have antibodies to fight off the sick messaging that Tate is giving. All they see is the guy who’s got a Bugatti and joking about telling women to make him a sandwich.

“When teachers try to explain why Tate isn’t someone to look up to, the teenage boys ask them, ‘Well, what colour is your Bugatti?’

“The premise needs to be attacked directly, which is that ‘no, money isn’t the main index of masculinity’. Otherwise, we would all just be looking up to gangsters and criminals.”

Knowland, who teaches English and has forged a career as an online tutor, was sacked in 2020 after refusing to take down a video he made for his students called The Patriarchy Paradox, which repeated claims that women would revert to a primitive life without men.

Knowland believes the issues he was seeking to address in the lecture, which is still on his YouTube channel and has had 255,000 views, have only increased since his sacking.

The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) decided to take no action against Knowland after an inquiry. Eton College has previously said that the ruling did not undermine its decision to dismiss him.

The school reported the lecture to the TRA, which considered charges of undermining tolerance and failing to safeguard students but closed the case with no further action. In a statement, the school said: “This does not mean that Mr Knowland did nothing wrong or that Eton was not entitled to dismiss him.”

He added: “I think the most interesting part about the lecture and what resonated with my supporters was my stress on chivalry and the idea that a man’s strength should be put to the service of the weak and his family.

“Chivalry is the thing that we’re missing today and it’s become deformed and turned into machismo, which is masculinity without any sense of humility or meekness. I think this is what we need to return to. Some of the problems that Tate is addressing, things like men should be assertive, men should be competitive, men should be strong, etcetera, chivalry agrees with.

“But chivalry says, ‘Why do they need to be those things? Because it’s to serve the weak, not themselves.”

Knowland, 37, believes that Tate — who rose to infamy last year after videos of his diatribes led to him becoming the world’s most googled person — has tapped into a “malaise” among young men caused by the teaching of boys in schools.

As an example, last month Scotland had to pause movement of transgender prisoners after a row over whether a transgender female rapist should be imprisoned with biological women.

“For some, even saying that there are biological differences between men and women is offensive. That’s what my lecture said, that men are stronger,” Knowland added. “I don’t think that [women] should [compete in sport against transgender women]. I don’t think it’s safe.

The example I gave in the lecture [was] of the transgender fighter who fractured the woman’s skull, and could easily have killed her. I think there are good reasons why sporting bodies are moving towards and in some cases have already decided that there’s not going to be next events like that.”

During the Eton furore Simon Henderson, the head master of Eton, was criticised in some quarters for pursuing a “woke” culture at the school and his critics referred to him as “Trendy Hendy”. They pointed to pupils being asked to wear Black Lives Matter waistcoats and decolonising its curriculum as examples of the institution being captured by ideologues.

The content Knowland produces on his YouTube channel continues to be controversial. A recent video by the devout Catholic is entitled “Eight facts that killed evolution for me”.

“The lecture was addressing some very live issues at the time and it’s only got worse since then,” he said. “Women now feel that they haven’t got safe spaces to get undressed to go to a swimming pool. So those concepts in the lecture were hard hitting and provocative, because these are topics that are big ones that people have strong feelings about.”

While Knowland does not agree with the term transgender — “there are only two categories of sex, using the term transgender concedes too much ground” — he is alive to the issue of transphobic bullying. The issue has been in the spotlight this month after Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl, was stabbed to death in a park.

“People being subjected to transphobia is terrible,” he said. “People shouldn’t mistreat anybody just because they’ve got a mistaken idea that they are a woman. They need to be treated with compassion, not attacked or bullied.”

Knowland’s newfound career as an online tutor, as well as hosting a podcast, has eased some of the pressure he felt after his sacking. He said: “At Eton our family home was a benefit, so that was on my mind when I was leaving. I had to wait a couple of years after leaving to get a home because being self-employed, you have to get all the paperwork to get a mortgage.

“I’ve actually had parents get in touch because they supported me over what happened at Eton and wanted me to tutor their children.

“Losing my job was concerning but it gave me an insight into what it feels for someone to be cancelled. Fear is such a powerful weapon to stop people believing what they’re passionate about.

“People feel they can’t say anything, because consequences are going to be too severe, but now I’ve been through it I’ve actually found it freeing.”

Such thinkers had a heyday a century ago, in the European wreckage of World War I: Julius Evola, the mad monk of Italian fascism; Charles Maurras, the reactionary French nationalist; Charles Coughlin, the American radio ranter; and even the author of a German book called “Mein Kampf.”

Putin has followed that counsel to the letter, and he must have felt things were going well when he saw window-smashing rioters in the corridors of the U.S. Congress, Britain’s Brexit from the European Union and Germany’s growing dependence on Russian natural gas.

Alas, a competing sea-based empire of corrupt, money-grubbing individualists, led by the United States and Britain, thwarted Russia’s destiny and brought “Eurasia” — his term for the future Russian empire — low.

Dugin tells essentially the same story from a Russian point of view. Before modernity ruined everything, a spiritually motivated Russian people promised to unite Europe and Asia into one great empire, appropriately ruled by ethnic Russians.

In his magnum opus, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” published in 1997, Dugin mapped out the game plan in detail. Russian agents should foment racial, religious and sectional divisions within the United States while promoting the United States’ isolationist factions. (Sound familiar?) In Great Britain, the psy-ops effort should focus on exacerbating historic rifts with Continental Europe and separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Western Europe, meanwhile, should be drawn in Russia’s direction by the lure of natural resources: oil, gas and food. NATO would collapse from within.

Putin has turned to the pages of Dugin’s text in which he declared: “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia,” and “without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”

So what comes next, should Putin manage to “resolve” Russia’s “problem” in Ukraine? Dugin envisions a gradual dividing of Europe into zones of German and Russian influence, with Russia very much in charge thanks to its eventual stranglehold over Germany’s resource needs. As Great Britain crumbles and Russia picks up the pieces, the empire of Eurasia will ultimately stretch, in Dugin’s words, “from Dublin to Vladisvostok.”

according to Dugin, China, too, must fall. Russia’s ambitions in Asia will require “the territorial disintegration, splintering and the political and administrative partition of the [Chinese] state,” Dugin writes. Russia’s natural partner in the Far East, according to Dugin, is Japan.

Dugin’s 600-page doorstop can be boiled down to one idea: The wrong alliance won World War II. If only Hitler had not invaded Russia, Britain could have been broken. The United States would have remained at home, isolationist and divided, and Japan would have ruled the former China as Russia’s junior partner.