Is America just another country?
That may seem like an odd question to ask as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, the greatest testament to individual liberty and popular sovereignty the world has ever known. But, amazingly, some on the right are making just that claim. America, they tell us, isn’t an idea; it is a nation built by a distinct people based on shared ancestry, shared soil, shared history and shared culture — and that these, not the lofty ideals of our Declaration, are what make us great.
This is dead wrong. We are the first nation in human history built not on blood and soil but on an idea: the idea of human freedom. What unites us as a people is not a common bloodline, but our common creed.
“There is at present no American ethnicity,” historian Gordon Wood explained earlier this year at the American Enterprise Institute, and “there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776.” In 1790, Wood said, only 60 percent of the White population was English. The citizenry was what John Adams called a “Hotch potch of people such an omnium gatherum of English, Irish, German, Dutch, Sweedes, French, &c. that it is difficult to give a name to the Country, characteristic of the people.”
What gave us that defining characteristic was our creed. Most European states, Wood said, “were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or language.” But in the United States “the process was reversed.” We were united as one people by a shared belief in a set of ideas — that “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This unique patrimony is the reason Americans can make the audacious claim that we are an “exceptional” nation.
Whether they realize it or not, the blood-and-soil nationalists reject the very idea of American exceptionalism. If what makes us a country is shared land, language and culture, well, that is true of every country. They appear to agree with President Barack Obama, who infamously declared, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
In other words, he did not believe in American exceptionalism. And neither do these conservatives. Indeed, by seeking to graft European-style “blood and soil” nationalism on the American body politic, they are inadvertently making common cause with the far left, which also rejects American exceptionalism through its insistence that America’s founding ideals were always a lie told in the service of slavery and oppression.
Yes, we have a shared history, and we should all take pride in what our forebears achieved. As President Donald Trump put it in his brilliant second inaugural address, they “crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens, and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”
And our ideals are what made all those great achievements possible. The Americans who accomplished these great feats came here (or descended from those who did) to escape the stifling, stratified societies of their birth seeking the opportunity to — in Thomas Jefferson’s immortal framing — pursue their happiness. They saw that this was the only nation on Earth where the common man could rise above his station and go as far as his effort and ambition would take him. We were, and remain, a land of endless possibilities precisely because our nation was built on the ideas contained in our Declaration.
If our nationhood is defined by those achievements, and not the principles that undergird them, then our foundations are necessarily fleeting. Across the world, one can see the ruins of great castles, palaces and temples built by long-lost civilizations. Empires rise and fall. But America’s ideals are eternal. They will outlast every road, bridge and skyscraper our forebears built. No nation will ever come up with a creed that surpasses them.
Our creedal identity is precisely why we need not fear the rise of nationalism in America. In Europe, nationalism is based on ethnicity — and, in its most toxic form, pride in the superiority of a particular race. But our nationalism is a belief in the superiority of the American idea. European nationalism is inherently exclusive. But American nationalism is inherently inclusive, open to those who come here legally and accept our creed, our Constitution and our founding principles.
The problem today is that, in recent years, we have allowed far too many into our country who do not believe in our creed (just look at the pro-Hamas demonstrations in major American cities.) That is intolerable. But the solution is to fix our immigration system, not abandon our identity as the world’s only creedal nation. Because millions come to our country each year who do love America. And millions more have been inspired by our example to throw off the chains of oppression and assume the blessings of liberty in their own lands. As Jefferson put it in his last letter before he died on the Fourth of July 1826: “All eyes are opened or opening, to the rights of man … [and] the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
That belief is what makes us Americans. It is what makes America unique. So, don’t buy into the snake oil of the anti-exceptionalist right. America is not just another country; it is an idea — the greatest idea in the history of the world.
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