Jedediah Purdy is professor of law at Duke University.

It is a bipartisan commonplace to talk about America as a nation of ideas. House Speaker Paul Ryan declared in 2016 that the United States is “the only nation founded on an idea, not an identity.” President Barack Obama said pretty much the same thing when he won reelection in 2012. Alexander Hamilton himself opened the first of the Federalist Papers with this thunderclap: It was up to Americans “to decide … whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” What could guide “reflection and choice” but ideas?

But the image of the United States as a country of ideas suffered a severe setback in November, and it has been reeling ever since. Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential win violated so many norms—civility, avoiding explicit racism, the rudimentary appearance of consistency—that a subtler omission was easy to miss. Trump had no truck with the paean to America as a constitutional nation, a continuous inheritance of principle running from Lexington and Concord through Philadelphia and Gettysburg, Selma and the March on Washington, and down to today. The mogul from Trump Tower talked instead about warring tribes, the need for “Christians” to “stick together” (as he claimed Muslims do), the danger from “Mexicans” (including American-born judges of Mexican descent) and, of course, zero-sum “deals” that would surely cow the Chinese and the Iranians. And Trump was full of contempt for the fine talk of more conventional politicians, deeming the principles they preached just hypocritical horseshit.


Trump’s victory was a vivid reminder of something that has been easy for many people to forget in recent decades: As often as Americans have imagined that they inhabit a country of ideas, many have insisted instead that it is a nation of identity, a land of blood and soil, more about who you are than about what you affirm. Then in August, hundreds of white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to rally to the blood-and-soil idea—some chanting that very phrase—and one of them murdered a counter-protester in an automobile attack that could easily have killed many more. Notoriously, President Trump responded by lamenting violence and bigotry on “many sides,” implying that the white-tribe view of America is no less legitimate than its opposite.

As nation-of-identity politics has risen, nation-of-ideas practice has been battered. In his seven months in office, Trump has shown indifference to and contempt for the notion of shared principles, flouting basic ethical norms of financial disclosure, trolling the American institutions that elected leaders usually treat with some deference, like federal courts and the press. He has shown consistent contempt for the very idea of political principle in favor of an erratic personal code built around loyalty and betrayal, esteem for money as a sign of virtue (or at least virility) and a penchant for any utterance with shock value. As many have observed, it is as if the national id had occupied the White House and announced to its constitutional superego, “You’re fired!”

Trump might seem a singularly disruptive individual, but there are signs that he is a symptom of a bigger underlying shift. The well-regarded World Values Survey recently asked Americans, on a scale of 1 to 10, how important it was for them to live in a democracy. Only 30 percent of Americans born since the 1980s chose the highest value of 10, compared with more than 70 percent of those born before World War II. Since 1995, the share of well-to-do Americans (those in the top 20 percent of income) who approve of having “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections” has doubled, to 40 percent. Strongman politics fits naturally with nationalist identity-mongering, because a leader who acts for “the people” (the “real” people, that is) doesn’t need moral justification; he can act on the simpler imperative to protect what’s ours. Public trust in the Supreme Court, often regarded as the special voice of principle in American government, has fallen overall and fractured along ideological lines.



As nation-of-identity politics has risen, nation-of-ideas practice has been battered. It is as if the national id had occupied the White House and announced to its constitutional superego, “You’re fired!”



We all know the lived experience of the new American tribalism, both the outward-facing kind—us, the United States, versus them, the rest of the world or at least our chosen foes—and the inward-facing kind—the bubble neighborhoods, the fractured media, the rush of blood upon seeing bumper stickers for the other candidate. We know the sense that there is not even a common premise of fact in an argument over a new police shooting or the latest Trump tweet. There is a sense that maybe there is no way out of these foxholes, that this clash of tribes rules out even an imperfect common understanding or a partial overlap of common principles that might breed progress. At a bubble-neighborhood musical event recently, I stepped aside for a well-groomed, younger middle-aged guy whose shirt said, “I’VE BEEN TO THE FUTURE. WE WON.” At first, I kind of liked it. Then I wondered, what did WE do to them? What would they have done to us, if they had won instead? And who drew the lines?

So, are Paul Ryan, Barack Obama and other nation-of-ideas defenders just hypocrites, or dupes? Is it better to look the American beast in the face and admit that it has always been a regime of “majoritarian bandits,” as the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates judged in his book Between the World and Me? Is “American ideas” one of those phrases, like “how women are” or “the will of the West to survive” that are to thinking as huffing gasoline is to breathing? Or is there still value in Americans committing ourselves to shared ideas? The answer depends on what those ideas, in 2017, should be.



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The nation-of-ideas conceit has always been at best half myth. Yes, American citizenship for the first hundred years of independence was a radical experiment in political equality. Universal male suffrage, widespread property ownership and social mobility made the country the most democratic in the world—but only for those who counted as citizens, meaning white men. The United States shut out and suppressed its domestic outsiders, especially slaves and other nonwhites, more brutally and categorically than Old World elites did their disenfranchised laborers and peasants. This was the most equal and the most unequal of countries.

No one knew this better than Frederick Douglass, who, in 1852—165 years before Trump notoriously praised him as “somebody who’s done an amazing job” and “is getting recognized more and more”—told a group of New York abolitionists, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” and “your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license.” Douglass’ onetime mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, had said much the same in an 1829 Fourth of July address, complaining of “our hypocritical cant about the unalienable rights of man.” Five years after Douglass’ address, Roger Taney, the long-serving and eminent chief justice of the Supreme Court, confirmed the abolitionists’ claim that American ideals were really white privilege: Slavery was part of the constitutional order, he ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford, and a descendant of enslaved Africans could never become an American citizen. True, Taney conceded, Thomas Jefferson had written that “all men are created equal,” but when a slaveholder wrote those words, a candid reader must assume he meant all white men. The principles, as universal as they sounded, really advanced only one of the tribes.

Illustration by Matt Chase

The Civil War and the constitutional amendments that followed abolished chattel slavery and made citizenship theoretically race-neutral, but they hardly buried the identity-first strand of American nationalism. Teddy Roosevelt, hero to many latter-day progressives for his war on monopolies and attacks on money in politics, ran with a blood-and-soil crowd that loved to praise “the Anglo-Saxon peoples” and warn that immigrants from lower races were diluting the national stock. (The nationalist internationalism of former White House strategist Steve Bannon, with its goal of linking up like-minded parties in Britain, France and elsewhere, carries echoes of the Roosevelt crowd’s axis of white people.) And whenever black people or any other disfavored group has made major advances, an identitarian reaction has followed, from the white supremacists who broke Reconstruction and established Jim Crow, to South Carolina segregationist Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat presidential campaign in 1948 and Alabama Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace’s presidential run in 1968, a direct reaction to that decade’s gains in black civil rights.

The roots of the Trump movement are deep and quintessentially American, and after decades in abeyance, they are blossoming mightily. Why now? It’s not all the Trump effect. For one thing, we’re living through the long unraveling of the Cold War era. The modern notion of an American consensus around personal liberty, legal equality and a few other principles was in good part the product of that time. Warring with the Soviet Union for global influence, especially among nonwhite post-colonial countries, American elites realized the United States could no longer afford to be seen as an apartheid state. The Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to declare segregation unconstitutional, the Democrats broke with their Southern flank to support civil rights legislation, and organized conservatism renounced its nativist, America-first wing and stopped welcoming open racists. Meantime, the Democrats and the labor movement, eager to be seen as patriotic, broke or expelled their anti-capitalist radicals and positioned themselves as squarely inside the American order of shared prosperity.



The roots of the Trump movement are deep and quintessentially American, and after decades in abeyance, they are blossoming mightily. Why now?



It seemed to work pretty well in decades when wealth and income were distributed more equally than at any other time in the past century. Scholars and pundits got into the habit of describing an America that was deeply unified around the shared ideas of liberty and equality, even though working out the meaning of those ideas had been a long struggle.

The past year has seen the full-throated return of what the Cold War consensus had repressed. After Republicans spent years accusing the thoroughly moderate, market-friendly Obama administration of “socialism,” young voters sick of precarious jobs, high debt and inequality decided they might as well try it and flocked to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. But the most vivid revival was Trump’s America-first nativism, a familiar strain in American politics until the decades after World War II. Trump, with a marketer’s nose for the unsatisfied appetite, tested whether there would still be consequences for bucking Cold War internationalism in favor of American identitarianism. His presidency brings back a kind of discourse that was shut out of official high politics during the Cold War (even as right-wing politicians dog-whistled to it), but has been at least as important as high principle for most of the country’s history.

If America is now going to recover its sense of a country based on something more than competing tribes, it will mean acknowledging that American divisions have deep roots and that grappling with them will take more than appeals to the better angels of our nature.



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At the end of the speech in which he famously denounced Independence Day as having nothing to do with him or other enslaved people, Douglass veered to say that what could save the country from itself was the ideal of the Declaration of Independence—real equality among citizens—and that his listeners should not turn their backs on that ideal but begin to take it seriously. He might have been right. Principles are always woven partly out of myth and hypocrisy, and in practice they are always better for some people than others; but they are also a way of trying to be accountable to people who are not like you, people you don’t like, even people who frighten or disgust you. Self-affirmation doesn’t do that. When it has been most productive, the conceit of “American ideas” has motivated people to confront the country’s crimes and hypocrisies and work to overcome them.

The Cold War consensus isn’t something we can recover in a new global environment, and we shouldn’t want to: It suppressed real points of conflict that have only intensified since. In setting aside questions of who gets what in favor of making the overall economy larger, it left massive racial gaps in family wealth, incarceration and vulnerability to both crime and police violence. Respectable commentators in recent years dismissed this kind of distributional consideration as un-American “class warfare.” Warfare or not, it now seems a simple acknowledgment of the facts—deep inequality and the resentment it breeds—which the country will have to grapple with for any revival of common ideas to materialize.



When it has been most productive, the conceit of “American ideas” has motivated people to confront the country’s crimes and hypocrisies and work to overcome them.



Solidarity is one idea that might help begin coming to terms with these conflicts. Trump used the word in his inaugural address—surprisingly, the first time a president had done so. In his mouth, it had a nationalist meaning, but historically speaking, it is a word for robust democracy—from the Polish workers’ movement of the same name that helped bring down the Soviet-backed communist state in the 1980s to the social democratic governments of Europe that built, for a few decades after World War II, the most egalitarian societies the modern world has seen. It evokes being in a shared struggle, lending a hand, understanding that people can flourish only with support from one another.

Coming together does not mean embracing Trump’s “many sides” framing. Some American inheritances, such as nostalgia for the Confederacy’s racist social order, are flatly incompatible with real solidarity, and must be fully repudiated. And like other values, such as liberty and equality, solidarity inevitably has left-leaning and right-leaning inflections that might seem at odds—more emphasis on public higher education, on the one hand, and respect for and identification with law enforcement on the other, for instance. But institutions such as unions, public schools and religious communities still connect people with very different partisan outlooks. The fight over repealing Obamacare, with its unexpected surge of rural conservatives recognizing their communities’ reliance on Medicaid, is a reminder that when institutions really do tie people together and serve their essential needs, those institutions are harder to shred by vilifying them or identifying them with the other tribe.

Today, too, solidarity evokes the difficulty of building movements and coalitions among people who may not know, like or trust one another. Solidarity is a call not to double down on self-affirming rallies, but to recognize lines of commonality that have been invisible—between debt-burdened college graduates and blue-collar workers who cannot earn enough to buy a house, for instance. It asks whether rural gun owners who say they mistrust the government can listen to Black Lives Matter activists who grew up fearing the police, and whether both can listen to community leaders who say that under-policing and lack of gun control can burden poor urban neighborhoods just as police violence can.

The metaphor of “listening” is too polite to capture the reality of a time of conflict and mistrust. But what it suggests is real: the need to get outside our own heads, take seriously that we share the country with people unlike ourselves and ask, quite apart from whether we like them, what we have in common and what we don’t yet have but might. Douglass was right: American self-congratulation for our supposed principles is still the worst thing about the country—except for the alternative, bare self-affirmation without principle. Maybe the high ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, some 240 years later, should be reprioritized as liberty, equality and the hard working-out of things we can have in common—that is, the pursuit of solidarity.