Thanksgiving invites us to pause and consider the gifts we often overlook. This year, at a moment of rising political unease and ideological confusion, I am especially grateful for one extraordinary inheritance: a nation and its creed brought into being by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Why, in addition to family, friends and a feast, is this on my mind today? In certain circles, especially among “postliberal” thinkers on the right, it’s now fashionable to claim that the Constitution has failed. Some argue that the country’s founding was overly individualistic or insufficiently moral, that our constitutional structure prevents the pursuit of a unified national purpose, or that what we need instead is a more powerful state headed by a muscular executive and a more cohesive cultural or religious identity enforced from above.
These arguments aren’t abstract. Some theorists openly celebrate unchecked executive power or regimes that derive legitimacy from hierarchy rather than the people’s consent. Increasingly, they dismiss the founding not as a glorious achievement but as an obstacle to national renewal through centralized authority.
This agenda ignores the extraordinary success of the American constitutional experiment and the astonishing diversity it has held together for nearly two and a half centuries. As famed historian Gordon Wood recently reminded us in the Wall Street Journal, America has always been different. Most countries emerged from a shared language, lineage or ancient heritage. The United States did the opposite: It built a state first and then had to discover what it meant to be a nation.
From the beginning, America was a mixture of peoples. John Adams wrote that it resembled “several distinct nations almost” and pondered whether such a collection could truly cohere. Leaders marveled as the first census revealed an array of languages, religions and origins. Yet over time, Americans did form a common identity — not through blood or inherited culture, but through shared ideals. National unity solidified after these ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence and given lasting institutional form in the Constitution.
This is what makes the United States what Wood calls a “creedal nation.” To be an American is not to descend from a particular people but to embrace a set of principles: liberty, equality (of opportunity), self-government and the rule of law. The Constitution brilliantly translated those principles into a durable structure, allowing people who differ in background and belief to live together as citizens. It allows a couple who arrived from Romania in 1980, or from Haiti or Mexico decades later, to stand on equal civic footing with families whose ancestors were here at the founding. That’s among our greatest blessings.
The Constitution has been amended and improved over the decades, often through great struggle. The post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments — especially the 14th — did not break from the founding but fulfilled it. They made national citizenship a reality and gave legal force to the moral principle of equality, tying every American to the generation of 1776. In that process, the Constitution was strengthened, not repudiated.
This reality helps explain why postliberal critiques faulting the Constitution for failing to impose a single moral or cultural vision miss the mark. Constitutional limits exist because the founders feared unchecked power, whether exercised by a ruler or by majorities which have at times been egregiously wrong. The Constitution protects a pluralistic society from the dangers of centralized authority and ideological certitude. In a nation as varied as ours, those protections are not optional.
We live in a time when self-appointed saviors on all sides claim to possess the single solution to our problems. The Constitution responds with humility. It demands persuasion, not imposition. It insists on limits. It expects disagreements. It trusts that freedom, not enforced consensus, is the proper foundation for a lasting political community.
The Constitution doesn’t guarantee national unity. It guarantees something better: a system that channels conflict without destroying liberty. As Wood notes, democracy can be volatile. The founders knew that well. Their answer is a framework that moderates collective impulses while preserving the rights of individuals and minorities.
This framework has steadied the nation before. It carried us through the early years, and through waves of immigration and rising diversity. It carried us through civil war, economic crises and global conflict. And if we remember what we have, it can carry us through our present troubles.
This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the institutions that have preserved our liberty even when they frustrate us. In a country bound not by ancestry but by shared principles, the Constitution is more than a governing document. It is the mechanism through which a diverse people becomes a nation. That’s a gift worth defending and giving thanks for.
Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.
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