Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
A simplistic reading of your "tragic" versus "therapeutic" views could be read (and I suspect will probably often be read) as "classical-Judeo-Christian" on the one hand and "Enlightenment-modern liberalism" on the other hand. This reading is plausible based on the traditional view of the Enlightenment as holding some sort of 'idea of progress' as inevitable, human nature as perfectible, and a Rousseauean view of the state of nature. This contrasts, of course, with what I understand to be classical views of human nature (e.g. stoicism) and, of course, the traditional Judeo-Christian Biblical view that man is inherently sinful (since the Fall unless one is a supralapsarian), and human nature corrupt and fixed.
Where the difficulty comes in is that while the original notions of American exceptionalism come from the original Calvinist settlers in New England, by the time of the revolution and the founding of the republic, the vast majority of the founders were not religious in that original sense, but men of their time, conversant with the ideas of the Enlightenment and couching their views of a republic and American exceptionalism in terms of a devotion to liberty that is inconsistent with traditional Christian, and certainly strict Protestant interpretations of sin and human nature. And, certainly, the greatest proponents of American exceptionalism in the 19th century came not from the religious right, as it were, but from the more liberal Protestants. It was religion in Europe, as well as secular tyranny, that was seen as the problem confronting the spread of liberty. American exceptionalism was manifested in a unique combination of an enlightened liberty that encouraged science and commerce and accepted a role for religion. Remember, in the 18th and 19th centuries, only a small portion of the American population, especially in frontier areas, was "churched".
How to understand this? The distinction you do not make, I think, is between the English-Scottish Enlightenment tradition (taken in a very broad sense as to include both Hobbes and Locke as well as the more traditional Enlightenment figures such as Hume, Dugald Stewart and Adam Smith, and possibly to include Kant who coined the term 'enlightenment') and the Continental, primarily French, Enlightenment which gave us Rousseau as well as Voltaire, Diderot, Bayle, Pascal, deMandeville, etc.
The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment is notable for never having never entirely abandoned the less than sanguine view of human nature so well described by Hobbes, and the English and Scottish thinkers never seemed to subscribe to the more extreme forms of the idea of progress current on the continent. At most, in them you see hope that reason can be employed to govern or check -- not replace -- the passions inherent in man, and the notion, therefore, that progress is possible. Not that human nature is perfectible, but that individual human beings, using reason, can be better. Which, consistent with the Anglo-Saxon systematic view of the building of knowledge, could (not necessarily would) make society better. This, of course, is consistent with the ideas one finds in the Founders, with American exceptionalism, and with the rise of modern science -- which would not have been possible in a world dominated the earlier Calvinist views.
On the continent, of course the hand of religion -- mostly in the form of ultramontane Catholicism, but often in the form of rigid state Protestantism as well -- was heavier than in England and Scotland. The struggles in French thought from the 17th into the 18th centuries ahs been well described by Georges Hazard in his The Crisis of the European Mind 1685-1715. I am particularly fond of his bon mot that sums the revolution in thought between the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the death of Louis XIV nicely: (from memory so I may be a bit off) "it is as if the average educated Frenchman went to bed thinking like Bossuet and woke up thinking like Voltaire."
Whatever the causes, it was on the continent that the more extreme version of the Enlightenment grew, the one that the right caricatures, if but slightly. [Although, I must say, I studied the Enlightenment with Leonard Marsak, a Francophile who did original work on deMandeville, at UC Santa Barbara in the '70s, and Leonard took the view that even the French enlightenment was not nearly so wedded to the idea of progress as inevitable or the perfectibility of human nature as generally believed even in scholarly circles or as the subsequent French positivists and socialists - think Comte -and later Marxists] And, it was in France the revolution became the caricature of the Enlightenment that so repulsed Burke, with its schemes to perfect mankind. French thought, when it has not been ultramontane (deMaistre), in the 19th century tended to be based on this extreme view of the Enlightenment, whether in the socialists or anarchists. Hegel himself was a conservative, but his philosophy, especially his philosophy of history, seems to me based on the more extreme view of the idea of progress as eschatology. And, of course, Marx comes out of both Rousseau and left Hegelianism.
Someone (Palmer? Peter Gay? ) once described the United States as the Enlightenment's program in practice. Properly understood as the English and Scottish Enlightenment, I think this is true. Of course, then, the communist states of the 20th century represent Marxism's program in practice and the results have been disastrous and tragic. And, of course, their excesses can be tied fairly directly to the underlying view of human nature as malleable and perfectible. Ironic.
The "therapeutic" worldview you describe really reflects a worldview based on Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. This reflects the success of the old left in the universities from the '30s through the '60s, as well as the success of the New Left who were our contemporaries in graduate school and who have mostly filled the ranks of the professoriat since.
I think the tensions in what is now conservatism today very much reflect the fact that those whose views are "liberal" in the same sense as the Founders, the classical liberals if you will, are very much on the defensive, from both the neo-Marxist left and the more fundamentalist religious right.
bttt