Identity

13 STORIES OF PEOPLEHOOD

It is difficult to theorize about national identity because existing nations are the by-product of complex and messy historical struggles that have often been violent and coercive. The resulting nations are workable platforms on which to create democratic institutions, but the outcomes continue to be contested and are constantly challenged by demographic, economic, and political change.

National identities have been created by four main paths. The first is to transfer populations across the political boundaries of a particular country, either by sending settlers into new territories, by forcibly evicting people who live in a certain territory, or by simply killing them off—or all three. The third of these was labeled ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s and was rightly condemned by the international community. But ethnic cleansing has been used by many countries in the past, including democracies such as Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and the United States, which saw settlers violently removing or killing off the indigenous populations of the territories in which they settled.

The second path to nationhood is to move borders to fit existing linguistic or cultural populations. Historically, this has been accomplished either through unification, as in the case of Italy and Germany in the 1860s and ’70s, or through separation, as when the Irish Republic left the United Kingdom in 1919, or when Ukraine declared its independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991.

The third path is to assimilate minority populations into the culture of an existing ethnic or linguistic group. France was a polyglot nation two hundred years ago, but over time the different local languages such as Provençal, Breton, or Flemish were gradually displaced by Parisian French. Similarly, immigrants to Argentina or the United States—or more likely, their children—learned Spanish or English to fit into the dominant culture and move up the social ladder. The apparent ethnic homogeneity of China, where more than 90 percent of the population are said to be Han Chinese, was the product of a lengthy cultural and biological assimilation of minority populations over three millennia.

The fourth path is to reshape national identity to fit the existing characteristics of the society in question. Contrary to the views of many nationalists, “nations” are not biological entities that have existed from time immemorial; they are socially constructed from the bottom up and the top down. Those doing the constructing can deliberately shape identities to suit people’s characteristics and habits. An example were India’s founders Gandhi and Nehru, who built on an existing “idea of India” that would incorporate that society’s extremely diverse population.^{1} The founders of Indonesia and Tanzania in effect created new national languages to unify their highly diverse societies.^{2}

The policies that do the most to shape national identity are rules regarding citizenship and residency, laws on immigration and refugees, and the curricula used in the public education system to teach children about the nation’s past. As well, in a bottom-up process, “stories of peoplehood” are told by a society’s artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, historians, and ordinary citizens who describe their own provenance and aspirations.

One of the most vivid illustrations of how nation building takes place in a democratic society was portrayed in the film Invictus, which tells the story of South Africa’s hosting of the Rugby World Cup in 1995. The new democratic South Africa that emerged from apartheid in the early 1990s was sharply fragmented along racial and ethnic lines. One of the cleavages was in sports, where whites followed rugby and blacks played soccer. The country’s visionary first president, Nelson Mandela, understood the importance of sports to national self-consciousness and deliberately sought to build support for the mostly white national rugby team, the Springboks, among the country’s black population. He did this against the opposition of his own African National Congress. He could not impose this preference on his followers; he had to cajole and persuade them. It helped that the Springboks eventually won the rugby title. They did this by beating New Zealand’s powerful All Blacks, a team that employs a bit of nation building itself when it performs a Maori war dance, the haka, before every game.

All four of the paths to national identity can be accomplished peacefully and consensually, or through violence and coercion. All existing nations are the historical by-product of some combination of the four and drew on some combination of coercion and consensus. The challenge facing contemporary liberal democracies in the face of immigration and growing diversity is to undertake some combination of the third and fourth paths—to define an inclusive national identity that fits the society’s diverse reality, and to assimilate newcomers to that identity. What is at stake in this task is the preservation of liberal democracy itself.

The contemporary European struggle over national identity begins with the founders of the European Union, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, who understood that exclusive ethnic definitions of national identity had been at the root of the two world wars that Europe experienced.^{3} As an antidote, they created the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, composed of France, Belgium, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, which was designed to prevent German rearmament while facilitating trade and economic cooperation in a formerly integrated region that had been ripped apart by war. The Coal and Steel Community evolved in stages into the European Economic Community and eventually into the EU, with a membership that grew steadily to encompass the current twenty-eight members.

The founders of the European Union deliberately sought to weaken national identities at the member-state level in favor of a “postnational” European consciousness, as an antidote to the aggressive ethno-nationalisms of the first half of the twentieth century.^{4} The hope of these founders was that economic interdependence would make war less likely, and that political cooperation would follow on its heels. In many ways, they were wildly successful: the idea that Germany and France, the two main antagonists of the world wars, would ever go to war with each other is vanishingly remote today. A stratum of young, usually well-educated Europeans are now born in one member state, get their education in another, marry someone from yet another country, and work in multiple locations within the EU and farther afield. They retain an awareness of their birth nationality, but their lives are tied to the EU as a whole.

But whether “Europe” has an identity stronger than the old national identities it was supposed to supersede is not clear. In the EU’s early decades, it was not politically acceptable to celebrate national identity too loudly at a member-state level. This was particularly true for countries such as Germany and Spain that had fascist pasts: citizens did not wave national flags, sing national anthems, or cheer too loudly for their country’s sports teams. For them Europe was a refuge, but not necessarily a preferred destination.

But the leaders of the EU were not in a position to invest much effort in building an alternative new identity.^{5} They did not create a single European citizenship; rules for citizenship remained the province of individual member states. The symbols of nationhood such as a flag and an anthem came late, and the EU’s diverse membership had no common civic education. But the most important failure was in the democratic accountability of the EU itself. The most powerful institution within the EU was the European Commission, an unelected technocratic body whose main purpose was to promote a single market within Europe. It was answerable to the people only indirectly, via the Council of Ministers, which represented the individual member states. A directly elected European parliament had rather limited powers, which has consequently failed to generate significant voter turnout or enthusiasm. Citizens of Europe knew that the important votes they cast were still those at the member-state level, and their chief energies and emotional attachments were directed there. As a result, they felt little sense of ownership or control over the institutions governing Europe as a whole.

So while the elites talked of “ever-closer union” within the EU, the reality was that the ghosts of the older national identities hung around like unwanted guests at a dinner party. This was particularly true among older, less educated voters who could not or would not take advantage of the mobility offered by the new Europe. These ghosts started to emerge at critical junctures, where they have created an existential threat to the EU as a whole.

This was vividly illustrated by the crisis over the euro, in which the common currency, issued first in 1999, allowed Greece to borrow profligately during the boom years of the 2000s. The Germans, who were perfectly willing to support their less well-off fellow citizens with an expansive welfare state, were not inclined to be so generous with the Greeks when the latter threatened to default. Greece indeed had very different approaches to savings, debt, and practices such as public-sector patronage than did Germany. Berlin, as Greece’s chief creditor, was able to impose crushing austerity on Athens with help from international institutions such as the European Central Bank and the IMF, a situation that persists to the present. The euro crisis exposed a deep rift within the eurozone’s northern and southern members, who today are far more aware of their national differences than they were prior to the outbreak of the crisis.

But the more significant conflict emerged over the related questions of immigration and refugees. Levels of foreign-born residents began to rise dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s for a number of reasons. First, the guest workers from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Morocco did not return home as initially expected; rather, they brought their families, had children, and started to settle in to their adopted countries. The dramatic expansion of the EU following the end of the Cold War opened the gates to massive immigration from Eastern Europe to the west, just as economic theory suggested it might as workers sought job opportunities in richer countries.

Migration from Muslim countries was always more controversial in Europe than was migration from elsewhere in the EU. The reasons for this were complex. In some cases, it was the result of simple racism, xenophobia, and cultural prejudice. Others feared that the newcomers were not “fitting into” the host societies. Charges were made that immigrants and their children were living in self-enclosed neighborhoods and not learning the national language even after years of residence.

These fears became far more vivid after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, followed quickly by a string of similar al-Qaeda operations in London and Madrid. These incidents triggered bitter debates over national identity in many European countries, since the terrorists often came from within their own societies. This was particularly the case in the Netherlands, which has, proportionately, one of Europe’s highest levels of Muslim immigrants. The controversy was started when Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay politician, argued in favor of closing off Muslim immigration on the grounds that Muslims were intolerant of people such as himself and would not fit into Holland’s permissive culture. Fortuyn was assassinated outside a radio station in May 2002, not by a Muslim but by an animal rights activist. But in 2004, Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch citizen of Moroccan extraction who was enraged by one of van Gogh’s films that the killer felt was disrespectful of Islam.

A further wave of violence occurred in Europe following the establishment of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in the wake of the Syrian civil war. These included the Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris in January 2015, the Bataclan attacks later that year that led to 130 deaths, the bombing of the Brussels airport in March 2016, and attacks making use of trucks to mow down pedestrians in Berlin, London, Nice, and New York City. A significant group of Muslims had been radicalized by the Syrian conflict, and by recruitment over the internet by radical preachers.

These attacks focused attention on citizenship and national identity precisely because so many of the attackers were citizens of the countries they attacked and second-generation children of immigrants. Many European countries, it became clear, were harboring growing populations of angry immigrants who were not being properly integrated into their host societies, a small number of whom indeed seemed to bear deep hatred for the values those societies espoused.

Earlier challenges to national identity did not seem so serious. Multiculturalism was born in some sense in Canada, where the French-speaking population in Quebec wanted the legal right to protect their language and education in a continent dominated by English speakers. The Meech Lake Accord, negotiated in 1987, would have amended Canada’s constitution to protect the province as a “distinct society.” It was controversial precisely because it constituted a form of unequal group recognition: French Canadians were to be given linguistic rights not enjoyed by English speakers. The accord was not approved, but Canadian federalism continues to protect Quebec’s special cultural rights by mandating the use of French by French speakers and immigrants.

Muslim immigrants tested the limits of multiculturalism in ways that the Quebec nationalists did not. The latter’s most extreme demands would have split Canada into two countries, but even a separation would not have represented a fundamental threat to democratic values, since an independent Quebec would have remained a high-quality liberal democratic state. The real impact of francophone cultural demands concerns Canada’s linguistic rules, which were at most an annoyance to English speakers who had to learn French and post bilingual signs.

The same was not necessarily true of some of the cultural beliefs and practices of Muslim communities. The most extreme cases were Muslims willing to commit terrorism against their fellow citizens. Overt violence crossed a clear threshold and would be intolerable in any society. Other practices were more complex. Many Muslim families arranged the marriages of their daughters, potentially contravening the rights of the young women to choose their own partners; some unlucky ones who disobeyed became the targets of honor killings. Many observant Muslims disapproved of homosexuality at a time when gay marriage was spreading like wildfire across Europe. Muslim groups, in the name of respect for culture, made demands to be treated differently: to be allowed to segregate women and girls, or to prohibit women from being treated by male doctors and nurses. And as a result of the bitter Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many Muslims displayed a kind of anti-Semitism that Europe had been vigilant in suppressing since the end of World War II.

The 2000s saw the emergence of an intense debate across Europe over citizenship, immigration, and national identity. Citizenship is a two-way street: it endows citizens with rights that are protected by the state, but it also enjoins duties on them, above all, the duty of loyalty to the country’s principles and laws. This was a particularly neuralgic issue due to the large welfare benefits of many European states: strong opposition arose to providing such benefits to immigrants who did not seem to accept the basic terms of the social contract. And some feared that Muslims, as opposed to earlier immigrant groups, might never properly assimilate into the countries’ cultures. Right-wing anti-immigrant parties such as the National Front in France, Denmark’s Danish People’s Party, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands gained support and put pressure on mainstream parties to accommodate their demands.

As a result, many European countries began to rethink their citizenship laws, and therefore the grounds on which immigrants could become full members of their societies. The failure to assimilate immigrants was not a one-way street: many European democracies made citizenship hard to obtain. Citizenship can be granted at birth on the basis of jus soli or jus sanguinis, or it can be acquired after birth through naturalization. Under jus soli, anyone born on the country’s territory automatically became a citizen; under jus sanguinis, citizenship depends on descent.^{6} The United States has always had a jus soli, but it was actualized for people of all races with passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Similar rules apply in countries such as Australia and Canada with relatively open attitudes toward immigration.^{7}

In Europe, the French have a long history of thinking of citizenship in political and territorial terms; though technically practicing jus sanguinis, their relatively easy terms for naturalization have permitted the almost-automatic acquisition of citizenship for second- and third-generation immigrants.^{8} French nationality has traditionally been defined as loyalty to the republic, the French language, and a French education; the Senegalese poet Léopold Senghor was admitted to the prestigious Académie Française in 1983 because of his contributions to French literature.

Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (as well as Asian democracies such as Japan and South Korea) have by contrast traditionally based citizenship on jus sanguinis and have made naturalization difficult. Before Germany’s laws were somewhat liberalized in 2000, second- and third-generation children of immigrant parents from Turkey or other Middle Eastern countries speaking perfect German could obtain citizenship only with great difficulty. By contrast, ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries could be naturalized on proof of German ethnicity, even if they spoke no German.^{9} Japan has one of the most restrictive systems of citizenship and naturalization of any developed democracy, as well as sharp limits on immigration, with the result that it is one of the least diverse of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.^{10}

Individual European countries began reforming their citizenship laws in the 2000s.^{11} In some respects these changes were helpful to social integration, shifting away from jus sanguinis and establishing a set of criteria for naturalization that could be plausibly met by an aspiring immigrant. New citizens were expected to demonstrate knowledge of the country’s history, to understand its political institutions, and to speak the national language with a certain proficiency. But in some cases, these requirements were made so demanding that it seemed they were meant to exclude rather than include. The German state of Baden-Württemberg, for example, made acceptance of gay marriage a condition of citizenship, a curious requirement in light of its own conservative Catholic heritage.^{12}

Beyond these formal citizenship rules, outright racism and other, more subtle cultural barriers deterred assimilation.^{13} Adjectives such as German, Dutch, and Danish have always had an ethnic connotation. Whereas an immigrant to the United States born in Guatemala or Korea can proudly assert that he or she is an American from the moment after taking the naturalization oath, it is much harder for German citizens of Turkish descent to say that they are German, even if they were born in the country and speak German as their native language. The Netherlands is famously tolerant, but that tolerance is built around parallel communities rather than integration on an individual level. Under “pillarization” (verzuiling), the Protestant, Catholic, and secular communities for many years maintained their own schools, newspapers, and political parties. When Muslims started arriving in significant numbers, they were often channeled into their own pillar, where they attended school only with other Muslim children. The Dutch system had worked well historically in maintaining social peace in a divided society, but in the twenty-first century it is an obstacle to assimilating immigrants of a very different culture.

The new Eastern European member states of the European Union were even less willing to accept culturally different newcomers than the original founding countries. The Soviet occupation of the region after 1945 and its imposition of Communism on them froze their social and political development. Unlike West Germany or Spain, they were not forced to wrestle with their nationalist pasts, nor did they make an effort to entrench liberal values in their citizens. They had virtually no experience with immigration and were among the least diverse societies in the developed world. After 1989 they gladly threw off Communism and rushed into the EU, but many of their citizens did not embrace the positive liberal values embodied in the new Europe. As a result, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán could declare that Hungarian national identity was based on Hungarian ethnicity, just as Adolf Hitler had declared that German identity was based on German blood. Brussels was seen by many new Eastern European leaders as a threat, primarily because it opened the door to unlimited immigration from the Middle East and Africa.

Another EU member state that had never fully accepted a European identity was Britain. For years Britain was the one key EU country that possessed a loud Euroskeptic fringe, represented by important parts of the Conservative Party and by newer groups such as the UK Independence Party (UKIP) under Nigel Farage.^{14} Britain’s unexpected vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 was predicted to have disastrous economic consequences, but the issue for many Leave voters was one of identity rather than economics. The vote is perhaps understandable in light of the historical legacy of English identity.

English Euroskepticism is rooted in a long-standing belief in English exceptionalism. The country was conquered in 1066 by a French dynasty and for the next several hundred years had a history deeply intertwined with that of the Continent. But when Henry VIII broke with the papacy in the early sixteenth century and created a separate Protestant national church, a distinctive sense of English identity began to take root. According to the historian Alan Smith,

This sense of separation was strengthened by the country’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, and by the political struggles surrounding the Civil War in the seventeenth century, which established the sovereignty of Parliament. That hard-won sovereignty was something not easily given up: if one listens to the rhetoric of the Brexiteers, the Continent is still enslaved, this time not by a pope or emperor, but by the European Union.

National identity in Europe is today confused, to put it charitably. Proponents of the European Union have not succeeded in creating a strong sense of pan-European identity that supersedes the identities of its member states. Those national identities are tenacious and vary tremendously among themselves, ranging from relatively open ones that could accommodate diverse populations, like that of France, to others that create deliberate barriers to the assimilation of immigrants, such as the one espoused by Hungary. The region is not threatened by immigrants so much as by the political reaction that immigrants and cultural diversity create. The anti-immigrant, anti-EU demons that have been summoned are often deeply illiberal and could undermine the open political order on which the region’s prosperity has been based. Dealing with this backlash will depend not on a rejection of identity itself, but on the deliberate shaping of national identities in ways that promote a sense of democratic and open community.

Compared to most European countries, the United States has had a longer experience with immigration and has developed a national identity better suited to assimilating newcomers. But this identity was the product of political struggles over prolonged periods and even today is not settled. It has been sharply contested by some since the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016.

Trump built his campaign around opposition to immigration, especially from Mexico and the Muslim world. Like their anti-immigrant counterparts in Europe, many of Trump’s supporters assert they want to “take back their country,” a claim that implies their country has somehow been stolen from them. An August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought together neo-Nazi and racist groups chanting “blood and soil,” and a torchlight rally deliberately reminiscent of National Socialism. In response to the rally, Republican senator Ben Sasse tweeted, “These people are utterly revolting—and have no understanding of America. This creedal nation explicitly rejects ‘blood and soil’ nationalism.”^{16}

Sasse’s sentiment that the United States is a creedal nation was highly laudable, especially in the face of a president who seemed to sympathize with many of the ugly sentiments on display at the rally, and the rank cowardice by other Republican politicians who failed to criticize him. But American national identity has evolved over the years; a creedal identity has emerged after decades of political struggle and is to this day not accepted by all Americans.

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay opens the debate on the proposed American Constitution in the following terms:

Note how specific and narrow Jay’s definition of American identity is. It is based on shared religion (Protestantism), ethnicity (descent from the English), common language (English), and belief in the same republican principles of government. Even Thomas Paine, considered a left-wing radical at the time of the Revolution, claimed brotherhood only with “every European Christian.” Thomas Jefferson doubted that he shared the same blood as the “Scotch” and worried about immigrants from the wrong parts of Europe coming to the United States, who would bring “the principles of the government they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness.”^{17}

Jefferson was not the only historical figure worried that the American character would be corrupted by importing the wrong type of person. The arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics in the 1840s triggered a nativist reaction fearful of the effects of “Popery” and alcoholism, a fear that eventually played out in the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment on Prohibition in 1917. The country’s Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites at times feared German immigrants, who might bring their absolutist instincts to the United States. This fear peaked after the country’s entry into World War I, when many German Americans sought to hide their ethnic heritage. The same was true for the millions of Southern and Eastern Europeans who arrived in the great immigration wave that began in the 1880s and lasted until passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which limited entry to the United States by national origin.

Religion and ethnicity were, in other words, key components of the way that many Americans thought about themselves. But a creedal narrative as well had equally deep historical roots, a narrative that contested this view. The French immigrant Hector St. John Crèvecoeur wrote in the 1780s that America was “the asylum of freedom, as the cradle of future nations, and the refuge of distressed Europeans” where “all sects are mixed as well as all nations.” George Washington portrayed a political understanding of the soon-to-be United States as a place “open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions.” The same Thomas Paine who could only imagine brotherhood with other Christians elsewhere saw the United States as made up “of people from different nations, speaking different languages,” but for whom “by the simple operation of constructing government on the principles of society and the Rights of Man, every difficulty retires and all the parts are brought into cordial unison.”^{18} These sentiments underlie the mottoes adorning the Great Seal of the United States: Novus ordo seclorum (“New order of the ages”) and E pluribus unum (“From many, one”).

The American Civil War was, at its root, a fight over American national identity. The Southern states explicitly linked identity to race by excluding nonwhites from citizenship. They drew on the founding principles of the Constitution to argue, as Stephen Douglas did, that democratic majorities in each state had the right to vote slavery up or down as they wished, and that the federal government had no right to interfere in this choice. Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, appealed not to the Constitution but to the Declaration of Independence, and the latter’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” In his debates with Douglas, Lincoln argued that this principle of equality trumped states’ rights; democratic majorities in individual states could not abridge the fundamental rights of people living within them. While Lincoln brought his country into war arguing for preservation of the Union, he understood from the beginning that the real issue was slavery and the threat it represented to the founding principle of equality.[5] This broader understanding of identity was the “new birth of freedom” that he referred to in the Gettysburg Address.^{19}

The defeat of the South in the Civil War widened the sense of American peoplehood through the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizenship to include all people born or naturalized in the territory of the United States (the jus soli), and gave them an equal right to due process; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denial of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Shamefully, the promise of these amendments would not be fulfilled until the civil rights era a hundred years later, and even today it is being threatened by measures seeking to restrict the franchise among minority voters. Yet the principle of a nonracially based national identity was clearly articulated, as well as the power of the federal government to enforce the underlying rights of Americans. It has become part of the way that most Americans think of themselves.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the de facto diversity of the United States made it impossible to define American peoplehood in either religious or ethnic terms. Following the massive wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, the percentage of foreign-born Americans had risen to about 15 percent of the whole population. Too many of them and their children fell outside traditional religious or ethnic categories for politicians to speak as they once did of the United States as a “Christian” or an “Anglo-Saxon” nation. Of John Jay’s four characteristics of peoplehood—shared religion, shared ethnicity, shared language, and shared commitment to common principles of government—only the latter two, language and common devotion to democratic government, remained.[6] This represented the “creedal” understanding of American identity referred to by Senator Sasse.

This creedal understanding of American identity emerged as the result of a long struggle stretching over nearly two centuries and represented a decisive break with earlier versions of identity based on race, ethnicity, or religion. Americans can be proud of this very substantive identity; it is based on belief in the common political principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law, democratic accountability, and the principle that “all men are created equal” (now interpreted to include all women). These political ideas come directly out of the Enlightenment and are the only possible basis for unifying a modern liberal democracy that has become de facto multicultural.

The type of identity politics increasingly practiced on both the left and the right is deeply problematic because it returns to understandings of identity based on fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and religion, which had earlier been defeated at great cost.

On the left, proponents of narrow identity politics assert that the U.S. identity is its diversity, or that we are somehow united by our diversity. Others have argued that the United States is too diverse to have a national identity, and that we shouldn’t worry about it one way or the other. In light of the populist understandings of identity that have lately arisen, it is understandable why people retreat to diversity as a virtue. To say that the United States is a diverse society is true. But diversity cannot be the basis for identity in and of itself; it is like saying that our identity is to have no identity; or rather, that we should get used to our having nothing in common and emphasize our narrow ethnic or racial identities instead.

On the right, some have retreated into earlier versions of identity based on race and religion. Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin once characterized “real Americans” as those residing in small towns and rural areas, something that deliberately excluded the diverse populations of U.S. cities. Donald Trump has taken this view to new heights, awakening an ugly form of populist nationalism that would reassert an ethnic or religious understanding of the country. As he said at one campaign rally in 2016, “The only important thing is the unification of the people” because “the other people don’t mean anything.”^{20} This implies in practice that the “real people” expel or somehow forcibly exclude the “other people” from civic life—not a formula for national unity, but for civil war.

Many theorists of modern democracy have argued that passive acceptance of a democratic creed is not enough to make such a system work. Democracies require certain positive virtues on the part of citizens as well. Alexis de Tocqueville in particular warned of the temptation of people in democratic societies to turn inward and preoccupy themselves with their own welfare and that of their families exclusively. Successful democracy, according to him, requires citizens who are patriotic, informed, active, public-spirited, and willing to participate in political matters. In this age of polarization, one might add that they should be open-minded, tolerant of other viewpoints, and ready to compromise their own views for the sake of democratic consensus.

Samuel Huntington was one of the few contemporary political thinkers to make an argument that the success of the United States as a nation depended not just on a minimal creedal understanding of identity, but on certain cultural norms and virtues as well. In his final book, Who Are We?, he famously asked, “Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.”^{21} He talked about what he called Anglo-Protestant culture as a necessary component of American identity, a culture that was built around the Protestant work ethic.

Huntington was denounced as a racist and, more recently, as an academic precursor to Donald Trump.^{22} A proper understanding of Huntington’s argument, however, would exonerate him of charges of racism, even if one disagreed with his policy prescriptions on immigration.

Huntington was not making an argument for an Anglo-Protestant understanding of American identity if that meant that only Anglo-Saxon Protestants could qualify as Americans. Rather, he was saying that the Anglo-Protestant settlers to the United States brought with them a culture that was critical for the subsequent development of the country as a successful democracy. The culture is important, not the ethnic or religious identities of those who take part in it. His view is, in my opinion, undeniably true.

One of the elements of that culture that Huntington emphasized was the “Protestant” work ethic. Empirically, Americans do work much harder than many other peoples around the world—less hard than many Asians, but certainly harder than most Europeans.^{23} The historical origins of this work ethic may indeed lie in the Puritanism of the country’s early settlers, but who in the United States works hard these days? It is just as likely to be a Korean grocery-store owner or an Ethiopian cabdriver or a Mexican gardener as a person of Anglo-Protestant heritage living off dividends in his or her country club. While we can acknowledge the historical roots of this culture, we must also recognize that it has become detached from its particular ethno-religious origins to become the common property of all Americans.

Huntington was, in my view, wrong to fear that Mexican immigrants would not eventually adopt Anglo-Protestant values and habits. Empirically, this worry would seem to be overblown. He was more justified in his concern that contemporary understandings of multiculturalism and identity politics were putting up unnecessary barriers to assimilation, barriers that did not exist for earlier generations of immigrants.

The question is not whether Americans should go backward into an ethnic and religious understanding of identity. The contemporary fate of the United States—and that of any other culturally diverse democracy that wants to survive—is to be a creedal nation. But it also needs an understanding of positive virtues, not bound to particular groups, that are needed to make that democracy work. While it would be wrong today to link identity to race, ethnicity, or religion, it is correct to say that national identity in a well-functioning democracy requires something more than passive acceptance of a creed. It requires citizenship and the exercise of certain virtues. A creedal identity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success.