J. D. Vance’s speech last week at the Republican National Convention has kicked off another round of the long-standing debate about whether or not we should see America as an “idea.” Vance did not dispute the role of ideas in American life, but — to the frustration of some critics of populism — he also said: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” Ironically, the very dispute about whether America is an idea reveals the limits of using ideas alone to define American belonging.
“America” has long had a kind of theoretical charge. I think of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s invocation of the “new yet unapproachable America I have found in this West” in his 1844 essay “Experience.” As Samuel Goldman chronicles in his 2021 book After Nationalism, what precisely constitutes that idea of America has changed over time. Goldman notes that after the Second World War a specifically creedal narrative of the United States became more prominent. This creedal narrative emphasized the importance of specific principles (particularly regarding rights and democracy) as defining what it meant to be American. That creedal theme had a long lineage in American life, but it seemed particularly adapted to the demands of the post-war period. The United States was in the midst of wars defined by ideology. It had just defeated fascism in the Axis and was beginning a decades-long struggle with the Soviet Union, an empire of atheistic communism. Moreover, a creed seemed a powerful vehicle for helping to find some commonality among a nation that had been transformed by waves of immigration.
Yet, in our own polarized time, narrowly creedal accounts of American belonging might be insufficient — not because they are too thin but instead because they are too rigid. Reducing Americanness to a set of principles immediately raises the question of which principles. It’s common among some proponents of “America as idea” to make the Declaration of Independence the locus of creedal belonging. But putting the language of the Declaration at the forefront only highlights the potential for controversy: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If “being American” means subscribing to the Declaration, does this mean that atheists (who by definition do not see these rights as coming from a divine Creator) are not American or are “less American” than religious believers? Many of our most intense public debates these days are about what precisely is demanded by “certain unalienable Rights,” so making some doctrinal creed the singular essence of America only invites accusations from partisans of various stripes that their opponents are “un-American.”
And that’s exactly what so much contemporary politics has been reduced to: volleys of excommunication. In his Oval Office address discussing his decision not to run for reelection after all, Joe Biden firmly declared that “America is an idea,” yet one of the principal themes of the Biden presidency has been the anathematization of his fellow citizens. In his “battle for the soul of the nation” address in Philadelphia in 2022, President Biden called “MAGA Republicans” (some unspecified swath of Americans) a “threat to this country,” saying that they “do not respect the Constitution” or “believe in the rule of law.” Biden’s “America as an idea” does not have room for the American who waves a Trump flag from the back of his pickup. That seems too narrow a conception of Americanness to me. (Just as it would be too narrow a conception of our nation to say that “woke Democrats” are somehow an existential threat to the country who need to be stopped at all costs.)
The idea of a nation as a group of people with some common experiences can have its own distortions. It can degenerate into jingoism, nativism, and selfishness. But that sense of being American as living together (something open to both immigrant and native-born) can counteract the temptation for anathematization in more ideological narratives of American life. Two neighbors can be equally “American,” even if they disagree about big policy questions.
No fire-breathing populist, Yuval Levin also rejects the reduction of America to an idea in his new American Covenant. “America,” he writes, “is not an idea; it is a nation, filled with men and women who live together and share in common a set of experiences, roots, and loves that render them fellow citizens.” There is much that is uncommon in American life. We do not all have the same experiences, backgrounds, or affections. But we can locate partial commonalities — things that many of us share. Principles (such as certain freedoms) can be among those commonalities, but there are other bonds, too: symbols, history, and the experience of living together. We also need a framework for working through disagreements, and those bonds — messier than doctrine — can help the public square cohere.