Michael Lind is co-founder of New America and author of The Next American Nation.

On July 4, as Americans celebrate the birthday of their nation, it feels a bit like the two major parties are celebrating different holidays for two different nations. Many of Donald Trump’s supporters equate the shrinking Christian majority with the real America. Many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters on the left have no room in their political alliance for non-Hispanic white Christians, particularly those in the working class.

The very fundamentals of American identity appear to be up for debate this year. And in many ways, they are. The problem, though, is this: Neither side is spelling out a vision for being an American that actually works for all Americans.


On July 4, it’s time to consider an inclusive idea of the American nation—a melting pot vision of American identity that reconciles America’s founding ideals with its racial and ethnic diversity.

This is a problem that America has always grappled with. The claim that the Founders sought to create a multiracial democracy that welcomed immigrants from all over the world might make inspiring Fourth of July oratory, but it isn’t true. The first U.S. naturalization act of 1790 limited citizenship to immigrants who were “free white persons,” excluding Africans, Asians and others. America’s white only-naturalization policy lasted until after World War II.

The Founders and their successors also struggled with the contradiction between black slavery in the United States and America’s creed of universal human rights. One popular solution to the dilemma was the idea that blacks deserved to be free—somewhere else. In his autobiography the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner, wrote: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that [American slaves] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” (The Jefferson Memorial quotes the first sentence but not the second).

Founded in 1816, the American Colonization Society, which sought to pay for the voluntary emigration of freed blacks to Liberia or another foreign country, was supported by Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Key. The idea of colonization did not survive the emancipation of the slaves following the Civil War. But African-Americans did not achieve full formal equality until the civil rights revolution, a century later.

Meanwhile, the Asian exclusion acts of the late 19th century shut the door on most immigration from Asia. Champions of a multiracial American community and nonracist immigration laws, like the ex-slave abolitionist Frederick Douglass, protested against America’s official white nationalism without effect.

White Americans also questioned the desirability of various European immigrant groups. In the Federalist Papers, John Jay equated Americans with Anglo-Americans: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors.” Benjamin Franklin worried that German immigrants were overrunning Pennsylvania. Irish immigrants were seen, at different times, as apostles of French revolutionary radicalism or agents of the Vatican hostile to Protestantism and liberty.

In the early 1900s, some American nativists argued that of the three supposed strains of the white “race”—the Nordic, the Alpine and the Mediterranean—only “Nordic” immigrants were compatible with the existing American community. In a 1921 article for Good Housekeeping magazine, Vice President Calvin Coolidge warned against intermarriage among “Nordics” and others: “Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” The system of national quotas for European immigrants, codified by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, sought to maximize the number of “Nordic” immigrants at the expense of Slavs, Jews, Italians and others.

By the 1960s, Nazi racism and the competition with the Soviet Union for post-colonial allies in Asia, Africa and elsewhere discredited traditional white nationalism in America. Reformers in both parties took an ax to white supremacy, dismantling formal racial segregation and abolishing the racist national quota system in immigration. As a result of the latter reform, immigration since the 1960s has been dominated by Latin Americans and Asians, leading to rapid demographic change.

But no broadly shared vision of a common American community has taken hold to replace the older white nationalism in the U.S.—one that can encompass people of all races and backgrounds and that reflects the country’s ever-growing diversity.

One response to this American national identity vacuum is narrow white identity politics on the right. Although neither populism nor nationalism is innately racist, the conservative populism of Trump appeals to white Americans nostalgic for an older racial and religious order in which, for example, one need not fear giving offense by saying “Merry Christmas” to strangers. Trump’s proposed Muslim immigration ban and iconic Mexican border wall are not serious policy proposals, but rather are appeals to white nativists for whom some Muslim-Americans and Mexican-Americans are Muslims and Mexicans first and Americans second.

It is one of the ironies of history that a common “non-Hispanic white” identity has emerged among Americans whose ancestors dreaded and despised one another. Today’s nativists who think that immigrants from Mexico and Central America should be kept out no doubt include many grandchildren and great-grandchildren of “unassimilable” Alpines and Mediterraneans. Similarly, a pan-Christian right uniting Protestants and Catholics against Muslim immigration is a new phenomenon in the United States, where the Protestant-Catholic division was the deepest divide for most of history. Theodore Roosevelt observed “that each mass of immigrants feels much distrust and contempt for the mass—usually of a different nationality—which comes a generation later.”

For their part, progressives have led the historic campaigns against white supremacy and religious intolerance. But the American left, too, has failed to promote a vision of a national community in which everyone, including white conservatives, can be a valued member. Instead, the left is deeply invested in the idea that the United States is not a diverse nation-state but rather a multinational state like Canada, Belgium or Iraq. The multiple “nations” or “peoples” of the United States are the five “races” of what the sociologist David Hollinger has called “the ethnoracial pentagon.” These are the official categories used by the U.S. Census: African-Americans, non-Hispanic whites, Latinos (or Hispanics), native Americans and Asian and Pacific Islanders. These categories were settled upon by the federal government in the 1970s, and all except African-American, with its historical basis in America’s white supremacist caste system, are arbitrary to the point of absurdity. For example, Arab-Americans and Norwegian-Americans are lumped together as “non-Hispanic whites” while Americans of Indian and Japanese descent find themselves part of an “Asian and Pacific Islander” community. What is more, according to the Census, Hispanics may be of any race.

At the same time, the liberal left in America can’t make up its mind about which identities are fixed and which are fluid. According to today’s progressive orthodoxy, you can choose your gender but not your race. To inflate the numbers of “nonwhites” in America, the center-left has adopted the “one-drop” rule of the old white segregationists—even one nonwhite ancestor makes you a nonwhite. Roughly half of Latinos in the U.S. call themselves “white” but 100 percent are assigned by progressive pundits and Democratic strategists to the “nonwhite” population. In this way, the left promotes some racial labels rather than others for partisan advantage.

For American politics to become a contest of the nativist right and the multicultural left would be a disaster. In both cases, ancestry, race and ethnicity are seen as more important than a common American identity. And shifting coalitions on different issues and cross-party compromise are not possible if the parties are identified with particular racial, ethnic and religious blocs. Every election then will become about defending communal identities.

So, what’s the alternative to white nativism on one hand and rigid, race-defined multiculturalism on the other? It’s the renewal of the ideal of the American melting pot, originally proposed generations ago as an alternative to Anglo-American Protestant nativism and “cultural pluralism,” an earlier form of multiculturalism which held that European ethnic groups in the U.S. would and should remain distinct forever.

The “melting pot” ideal was given classic expression by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1876: “The fusing process goes on as in a blast-furnace; one generation, a single year even—transforms the English, the German, the Irish immigrant into an American.” In his 1908 play The Melting Pot, Israel Zangwill has a character proclaim: “Understand that America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! … Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”

While the melting pot theory of American identity—if only for white groups—prevailed in the mid-20th century, it is no longer in vogue. The multicultural left makes two arguments against it. The first is to falsely equate two different things—assimilation and amalgamation. The melting-pot ideal is not assimilation—the coerced conversion of immigrants and their descendants into clones of WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) with Mayflower pedigrees. Rather, the melting pot stands for amalgamation, the voluntary blending of previously distinct groups into a new community. In the words of John Dewey, the “genuine American, the typical American” is “not American plus Pole or German” but “is himself Pole-German-English-French-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Irish-Scandinavian-Bohemian-Jew—and so on.”

A second argument holds that the melting pot ideal may have accurately described the fusion of Anglo-American pioneers with subsequent waves of European immigrants, but today’s multiracial America is best compared not to a metallurgical melting pot but to a “salad bowl” in which the ingredients retain their own identities. But the statistics do not bear this out. Measured by the adoption of English as the first language and rates of out-marriage over generations, today’s Latin American and Asian diasporas are blending into the American mainstream as rapidly as did the European diasporas of yesteryear. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2010 37.5 percent of newlywed native-born Asian-Americans and 36.2 percent of newlywed native-born Hispanics married outside of their race/ethnicity. Even among African-Americans, the greatest victims of both native and immigrant prejudice, intermarriage among newlyweds in 2010 was at an all-time high of 17 percent. This is a picture of a melting pot, not a salad bowl.

Today, an American melting pot would celebrate citizens with roots in all regions, not just Europe, and from all religious backgrounds, including Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Americans can and should celebrate particular ancestral nationalities. But central to this American ideal would be a sense that these myriad ethnicities and religions (not just the five arbitrary Census categories) were part of a great American mix. This does not require identifying with one of the few arbitrary racial categories that are central to white nativism and nonwhite racial nationalisms alike.

Envisioning an America that is both post-white supremacist and post-white is the work of poets and philosophers, many from outside of the historic mainstream. One is Jean Toomer, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance who chose “blue” as the symbol of a mixed-race nation in The Blue Meridian (1936) and declared “that here in America we are in the process of forming a new race.” Another African-American writer, Albert Murray, declared in 1970 in The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy, “The so-called black and so-called white people in the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.” In our time the Mexican-American essayist Richard Rodriguez has celebrated intermixture in Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002).

It’s time that this vision also became the work of politicians. A good beginning would be to scrap the absurd 1970s-vintage Census racial labels in favor of more specific ethnic or national ancestries: Chinese-American instead of “Asian and Pacific Islander,” Argentine-American instead of “Hispanic” or “Latino,” Italian-American instead of “non-Hispanic white.” This system of hundreds of ancestral ethnic terms reflects America’s actual diversity better than the system of five official “races.” Programs like affirmative action based on these arbitrarily-defined pseudo-communities should also be replaced by race-neutral policies to help all disadvantaged Americans—including the majority of America’s poor, who are white. This is perfectly compatible with combating contemporary racial discrimination, including the systemic discrimination by some police forces that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement.

The American nation-state was founded 240 years ago, but the American nation is a work in progress. On this Independence Day, let us celebrate diversity, by all means. But let us also celebrate hybridity, and the new and more inclusive forms of community that it makes possible.

