These examples show that for many foreign policy anti-Americanism has not been a rational response to US foreign policy but has its roots in an ideological objection to the United States. Ideological anti-Americanism has been less a stand-alone variety of anti-Americanism but more the underpinning for other critiques of the United States. What is it that these ideological anti-Americans object to in the United States? The prominent American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset has argued that, ‘The American creed can be described in five terms: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. Egalitarianism in its American meaning, as Tocqueville emphasized, involves equality of opportunity and respect, not of result or condition.’³⁴

Notions of liberty or egalitarianism obviously exist independently of any geographic association. For some in the UK, however, support for differing aspects of the ‘American creed’ and the desire to see Britain change in that given direction, to become so to speak ‘more American’ in that particular regard, has contributed towards their pro-Americanism. Tony Blair, for example, as he has pushed the Labour Party to abandon its commitment to old-style social democracy has thought to embrace the US notion of egalitarianism – equality of opportunity, and its corollary the legitimacy of wealth creation, in his rejection of more European notions of egalitarianism - of equality of outcome. Blair has specifically defined this debate in terms of learning from the successes of the USA and has also used these arguments when attacking the British House of Lords. Jonathan Freedland, a British commentator who has - until disagreeing with Blair on the Iraq War, Freedland opposed the war - been a leading supporter of Tony Blair in the media and apparently had significant influence on the Blair agenda, has explicitly put forward the notion that Britain needs to learn from the US and adopt more of the American creed to become a more modern, more progressive society.³⁵ Other politicians, at other times, most notably Margaret Thatcher, have taken other lessons from the ‘American creed’.

At different times, however, others in the UK have objected to differing aspects of the ‘American creed’ and from these objections developed a generalised anti-Americanism. In the 1830s Edward Wakefield was horrified by the lack of European style ideas of hierarchy and class in America and believed that this made a gentlemanly existence impossible and thus turned the United States into an uncivilised, barbarian place; ‘A people who, though they continually increase in number, make no progress in the art of living; who, in respect to wealth, knowledge, skill, taste and whatever belongs to civilization, have degenerated from their ancestors…who delight in a forced equality, not equality before the law only, but equality against nature and truth; an equality which, to keep the balance always even, rewards the mean rather than the great, and gives more honour to the vile than the noble… We mean, in two words, a people who become rotten before they are ripe.’³⁶ Wakefield believed that the only answer to the revolt against nature represented by the United States was for a cross-section of British society, excluding the lowest, to settle and colonize a new, old world - in New Zealand. Here a society could be established which would not represent a ‘new people’ and thus possess none of the ills of the United States, but be extension of the old, retaining the virtues of the old world but eliminating its poverty and overcrowding. Although the exact importance of his role is still debated, Wakefield’s enthusiasm for establishing an un-American settler colony undoubtedly played a significant part in the decision to annex New Zealand in 1840 and in its subsequent settlement.