There’s a scene from The Newsroom which has become rather infamous. In it, the main character (a blatant self-insert for the show’s writer, Aaron Sorkin), is placed onto a panel alongside two other speakers and asked what makes America the greatest country in the world.

In classic Sorkin fashion, he sets up both the other characters (one stereotypically liberal, one stereotypically conservative) as strawmen so he can then have his character knock down with some kind of grandiose speech or witty one-liner. The liberal character says America is great because of diversity. The conservative character says America is great because of freedom. Sorkin’s character then gets up, chastises them both for their cop-out answers, and starts delivering a lecture about how by every objective metric, America sucks. But rather than just leave it there, he asterisks his diatribe with a couple stock lines about how America used to be great — seeming to imply that even though America might not be great now, we could make it so.

This answer, of course, is also a cop-out. For all the condescension, not even Sorkin’s character can provide a meaningfully specific answer to what actually sets America apart. “Oh, we used to be great, we used to build things”: what does this even mean?

The scene is really fascinating to reflect on as a cultural relic of the 2010s. Around the time this episode aired, Aaron Sorkin wasn’t just some guy making a TV drama: he was something of a political celebrity. His prior show, The West Wing, was so successful it’d go on to fry the brains of an entire generation of political operatives. Sorkin’s style has always been to write political wish-fulfillment, not just indulging himself but also the entire class of political elites who think the way he does. This makes his work very interesting, as it provides a real window into the headspace of an entire culture.

For the type of person who Sorkin’s work spoke to, the Obama-era marked a bit of a cultural highwater. American liberalism — far from being under attack — carried with it a level of conceit surrounding its victory over the world. Of course, this conceit was rather shallow: the so-called “decade of hope” never provided us with a clear answer to the question of what defines our country. At best, you’d get people like Sorkin sneering at you for daring to pose the question. But, even then, it’s probably the closest thing we’d get to an honest answer.

Things are a lot different in today’s environment. American liberalism is very obviously under attack. It’s a lot harder for our political and media elites to speak frankly because they’re hypercognizant of the fact that their pessimism is not popular. Every statement made now has to be masked underneath fifty layers of patriotic rhetoric lest they show “bad optics”.

They’ll attend summer retreats where vote-hungry consultants advise them on leaning into “traditional American imagery”. They’ll run campaigns declaring their candidacy to be “a battle for the soul of America”. They’ll tag their legislative agendas with words such as “patriot” and “liberation” in the hopes of boosting support.

They recognize that in order to bring the country with them they have to appeal to a common identity and culture, but those appeals are meaningless if there’s no substance in what they’re appealing to. But when you’re completely ignorant of our traditions and foundations, all this patriotism amounts to little more than flag-waving.

What we end up left with is a very bizarre world in which self-proclaimed “Catholic monarchists” lecture us about how we need to preserve the founding heritage of our Protestant republic. One where it takes only one election cycle for the same paper that put out the 1619 Project to start fingerwagging on letting race get in the way of national unity. A world where our tech CEOs drum up a “race against China” while doing business with them behind the scenes.

Liberals will tell us the only way to save America is to scrap the Constitution and replace it with a European-style multiparty democracy. Progressives have long spoken of countries such as Sweden as a left-wing utopia in comparison to us (despite this being greatly exaggerated). For all the America First bluster that comes out of national conservatives, they salivate over Russian military ads and look to Hungary as their inspiration. This doesn’t even get into China, our supposed “sworn enemy” whose industrial policy and authoritarian mystique¹ our technocrats can’t help but envy.

Everybody wants to be the one to make America great again, but nobody seems to actually want to pull from the American political and cultural tradition. Isn’t that a bit odd? You’d think that someone who brands themselves a patriot would be proud of our heritage and want to build off of its foundations. But each and every single time, we see them import fundamentally foreign perspectives in order to tell us how the country should be.

The American press class has notoriously deep links to the United Kingdom and its own cultural elite. Progressive strategists here have a history of heavily collaborating with and turning to their British counterparts for direction. Many of the largest right-wing influencers were recently caught on the payroll of a Russian shell company. Two of the most influential oligarchs actively working to reshape the GOP are South Africans obsessed with eugenics.

That’s the thing about all the discourse surrounding how “the left (or the right) needs to embrace patriotism”: it gives the game away. The operative subject of identity in that sentence is “the left”. Not America. America is just a means to an end, a stand-in for separate concepts.

America is not a synonym for “Western civilization”. America is more than just “liberal democracy”. Forming transnational political allegiances doesn’t address the issue of what it takes for America, as a country, to move forward. It’s one thing for a communist to pledge their allegiance to the Internationale, because they don’t make pretenses to the contrary. It’s another when our liberals and conservatives — the very people who claim to represent the American project — start doing it too.

It’s deeply ironic that the people who talk the most about America are often the first to abuse it. The people who brand themselves “moderates” are often times the most bitter, cynical partisans. It’s one thing to criticize this country, it’s one thing to be jaded. That’s fine. But there’s something that irrationally, viscerally irritates me when I have to listen to the very people hellbent on destroying this country put on this show of defending it.

“Patriotic rhetoric” can provide a roadmap for winning the next election. What it cannot do is answer the question of what comes after that. If America is not the end, then the whole project is a nonstarter. No rhetoric will be able to paper over the latent desire for a national divorce.

But if America is the end, then our first question should be to ask what even is America?

A Brief History Lesson

America is not Europe. America is not the Anglosphere. We may share a common ancestry, a common mode of government, but we are still distinct. Calling to Europeanize our politics, calling to Europeanize our culture, is essentially a call to erase that which makes us distinct.

Don’t believe me? Just talk to a European about America and see how they regard us.

When Tocqueville the Frenchman famously came to this country, he regarded our society with a mix of both fascination and contempt. He found us to be strangely radical yet conservative. Deeply idealistic but practically-minded. Optimists carrying a deep-seated skepticism of authority. To him we were a country of both Puritans and charlatans, utopian but also self-serving. In Tocqueville’s view, we are a nation of many contradictions — a complete aberration that refused to conform to his European mold.

Tocqueville was a strong believer in the idea that democracy could have a civilizing effect on the people who lived under it. But America always stumped him. Here was a country that had made democracy work, but the people behind seemed too vulgar and materialistic for his tastes. But as he studied the United States, he began to see the unique circumstances behind the country’s origins, and the unique culture that in turn produced.

Tocqueville puts strong emphasis on America’s founding² going as far as to claim that all the customs, laws, and events he bore witness to a century later, he could trace back to the circumstances of this moment.

When the Puritans came to this country, the attitudes and practices they brought with them lay the groundwork for what would follow. A myriad of groups settled the various colonies, but the common thread between them was the desire to escape religious persecution. It was religion which played the dominant role in shaping and ordering American civil society. But far from secularizing the country, “the spirit of freedom” was formed into a theological concept.

That promise of being able to travel overseas and form self-governing communities set a very important precedent in American history: the resolution of conflicts via enterprising as opposed to total war. Historically, in Europe, most conflicts (be they religious, political, or identitarian) were resolved by seizing and wielding state power.

American history, however, is littered with examples of an opposite trend: Mormons pushing westward, black nationalists forming mutual aid networks, and hippies moving to communes. Time and time again the risk and romance associated with being a revolutionary was instead channeled into constantly chasing the next frontier. After the colonies came westward expansion, and after westward expansion was left a populace that was still deeply restless. Frontier nostalgia colored the imagination of 20th century radicals: they romanticized a world filled with danger, unknown possibilities, and the allure of development. Even in a “settled” society they were still tempted to recreate the experience so that younger generations would carry with them the virtues of self-sufficiency, risk-taking, and reckless idealism³.

The “frontier-brain” continues to loom over the American psyche, even today. A large part of why we have the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world is because we also have a populace that is exceptionally prone to risky behavior. We have some of the highest rates of homicides but also a long-standing culture that glorifies individual — not collective — violence. Americans commit terrorism not in the name of some grander revolutionary plot but out of pure ideological catharsis. Firearm ownership is stubbornly embedded into our national habits — efforts to curtail ownership have met fierce resistance, not on mere utilitarian grounds but on those of principle.

The same reason we had so many miners rush to California over dubious rumors of gold is the same reason why we are also home to highest concentration of startups. A lot of this will probably come off as deeply unhinged, but there’s something to be said about how that lunacy has also long acted as a spark for creativity. The past hundred years of American cultural dominance was in large part carried by counterculture: hip-hop, rock-and-roll, jazz, the list goes on. Each of these represented not just a rebellion against existing norms, but also a utopian vision: that the same communities that were already producing their own culture could build an entirely new society out of said culture.

A country founded on thirteen “miniature societies” bred within it a spirit of experimentation. Many of the early colonies were developed with a utopian bent in mind. Oglethorpe’s “Georgia experiment” would create a haven where debtors and prisoners could be rehabilitated. William Penn founded Pennsylvania as a Quaker “holy experiment” free of conflict: there was to be no standing militia, peaceful co-existence with the natives, and full religious tolerance. When the Puritans landed in Massachusetts, they saw their task as forming a “city upon a hill”: a godly society that would go on to pursue widespread education and literacy. Even following the Civil War, the Republican proposal of “forty acres and a mule” reflected a very specific governing ethos about how communities can rebuild and sustain themselves.

The results of these experiments were mixed, but their legacy would nevertheless persist in the American imagination. As Tocqueville remarks, American culture has long carried with it a deep-seated optimism⁴ that people can be trusted to do the right thing and that the country’s best days are always ahead of it. It’s this optimism that fueled various campaigns for moral reform. We can look at Prohibition, we can look at Civil Rights, we can look at the religious Revivals and see a common pattern: where ordinary people can not just force social change from the bottom-up, but drag the entire country along with them in the process.

And, when it works, it’s quite something to behold. The speed at which we went from apartheid to full racial integration is nothing short of miraculous. The extent to which attitudes have changed even among the most conservative segments of our society would not have been imagined back in the ’60s. There is no other post-colonial society that has made nearly the same amount of progress on race relations relative to its starting point as the United States.

What made this possible was that common moral foundation and the distinct ways in which Americans blended their politics into their theology. A country founded on religious liberty centered its national religion around this Protestant-ized concept of “God” — one just vague enough to be assimilable even by the various Jews and Catholics that would later immigrate into the country.

Textualism, skepticism of authority, rebelliousness, democracy, and self-criticism were all themes of the Reformation⁵, confined to the religious realm. But what we saw develop in the United States was an attempt to take these same motifs and project them onto the political dimension.

The way Americans came to relate to their Constitution in a lot of ways paralleled how Protestants related to their Scripture. Here was a tangible social contract, a “law above the lawgivers” that all members were bound to. Anyone could read it and understand their rights, all authorities were — in theory, at least — bound to it. This created a culture in which it was this specific document — as opposed to any leader, office of authority, or founding stock — that Americans tied their loyalties to.

This reflects the emergence of the United States as a country which defined itself in terms of civic (as opposed to ethnic) nationalism. Most nations have typically staked their definition primarily in terms of lineages, traditions, borders, and offices of authority. The United States cannot be fully defined along these lines. We are a country of incredible difference in terms of locale, ethnicity, geography, history, law, theology, and politics. The main thing holding “American” together as a coherent concept in people’s heads is downstream of our governing ideals and norms.

It’s very curious then, how despite the latent radicalism present across American culture and history, the extent to which the Constitution is conservative in its disposition. The threshold for amendment is impossibly high, the document frequently eschews majority rule in favor of safeguarding minority rights, and the various offices of government vary in their levels of democracy. The Senate was not designed to be an elected post, the judiciary is appointed to lifelong terms, the various checks and balances lend themselves to incredibly easy obstructionism, and the office of the presidency has long been compared to that of an elected monarch. The capacity for the federal government to enact widespread change was hamstrung, but state and local governments were given an incredible amount of leeway to dictate how they governed. The whole structure — designed around skepticism of power rather than direct democracy — is a lot more cynical than what you’d expect out of such a utopian-minded culture.

But, once again, that’s because the outlet for large-scale reform in this country has traditionally been expected to emerge out of civil society. By gumming up the ability for elites to enact change from the top-down, reformers (in theory) are left with little option but to work from the bottom up so that consensus may be built. Even over the past century, where the federal government has slowly chipped away at constitutional barriers, each erosion hasn’t come without real backlash and protest, slowly breaking down national consensus with it.

All of this comes together to create a very peculiar situation: self-criticism defines our culture. Social reformers are given the freedom to brazenly and controversially criticize the status quo, while conservatives are encouraged to use any number of obstructionist tools to keep their opponents in check. Our branches of government are intended to be continually at war, different states compete with each other, and different regions form their own cultural blocs. The progression of American politics ends up being one never-ending tug of war where our blind faith in the process itself stands as the one thing stopping us from tearing ourselves apart.

The most infamous and forceful critics of our government (such as Frederick Douglass) appeal to our founding documents even as they challenge our authorities. The rebels and dissidents of yesterday somehow find themselves canonized in our history as the patriots of tomorrow.

Perhaps there’s no better statement to sum up the American attitude than that by Theodore Roosevelt: “wise conservatism and wise radicalism always go hand in hand”.

Moving Forward

I am not saying the United States is above criticism. I am not saying the United States is the greatest country in the world. I am not saying you have to like the United States or want to protect it. I am not saying you cannot admire and be inspired by other cultures.

What I am saying is that if you do happen to be someone with ideas on what will “fix” the country, you better understand and appreciate the history that formed it. If you are someone who wants to accuse your opponents of being disloyal to the country, you have to show some of that loyalty yourself. If you are an elite who fondly reminisces on the days where we had full national consensus, you have to respect the founding principles that said consensus was built upon.

The fact is, today, we have a lot of politicians, a lot of pundits, and a lot of other elites who are enamored with the idea of patriotism. Not enamored with the country or culture itself, but purely the idea of having total social control. They want people to follow them, they want to be able to insist upon their own authority, but they don’t actually care much for the particulars of what authority they’re appealing to. Elite circles nowadays don’t raise their members in culture as much they do immerse them in propaganda⁶. And what propaganda teaches is that the only end worth pursuing is the neverending accumulation of power.

We tend to speak of men such as Martin Luther King as great propagandists, rhetoricians who packaged things just right to sell to the American public. Political campaigns spend millions trying to break down and distill this essence for their own agendas. Every civil rights movement since has fantasized about “getting their own MLK”. But all of this is a distortion of history.

The respectability politics of the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just about “looking good”, MLK genuinely believed Christian morals were necessary to build and sustain these communities. He didn’t just appeal to American identity: he deeply, genuinely saw the South as his home and America as a land of promise. His clashes with black radicals weren’t over strategy or optics but matters of genuine principle. Similarly, the church served not just as an accessory to the wider movement, but the heart and center of it⁷.

None of this would have worked or held up to scrutiny if the members of the movement did not genuinely believe in and belong to the culture they were fighting to redeem, if they did not genuinely believe and submit to the God whose authority they were appealing to, and if they were not relying upon the strength of the very people in whose name they claimed to speak. Crisis is a fire whereby these loyalties are tested, and they proved themselves by putting their lives on the line. It was these shared commitments which reminded and called others to see themselves in them.

By addressing their oppressors not only as fellow sinners but also as fellow Southerners, King and his followers exposed the moral claims of the white supremacist regime in the South to the most damaging scrutiny; and the appeal to a common regional past was probably just as important, in the eventual victory over segregation, as the appeal to “profound and ultimate unities,” in Niebuhr’s phrase. King always believed, even in the face of what sometimes must have seemed overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that “there are great resources of goodwill in the Southern white man that we must somehow tap.” When Lyndon Johnson became president, it was important to King to point out that Johnson was a “fellow Southerner” who was “concerned about civil rights.” Sympathetic Southern whites sensed that King spoke not only for black people but for the soul of the entire South. Hence the “admiration,” as Lillian Smith told King, of “thousands of white Southerners” for what he was doing. (The True And Only Heaven, 396)

That really then, just raises the question. In our current moment of crisis, where do our political leaders draw their support from? Do they return back to the American political tradition, look through the countless examples of forgotten movements to draw inspiration from? The experiments of the Puritans, the populist movements of the 19th century, or the labor movements of the 20th century?

But, they can’t do that because of their class position. The bourgeoisie is a class which is devoid of an organic culture. They interface with the world in terms of money and are materially detached from local concerns. The intelligentsia struggles with comprehending the unspoken aspects of on-the-ground development. As Lasch points out, the development of capitalism killed off a lot of our historic populist traditions⁸. Our elites have their own history, one in which clever leaders and clever plans lead the ignorant masses out of the wilderness.

Instead they turn towards the top-down ideologies: social democracy, national conservatism, Reaganism, technocracy. What connects all of these movements is they start by winning over elites, who then in turn can only rely on the levers of the state to push everyone else along.

We’ve heard the same formula pitched to us time and time again: that the problems with our country come down to election results and that if we change the system of law in this or that way (changing who can vote, abolishing the Senate, etc.) then all the incentives in our system will properly line up again. And once the system is set up in a way where the right people can win, they can pass their agenda and the country will unite under them.

This, of course is delusional. The deepest problems facing America are ones that emerge out of the collapse of civil society. Atomization, the subsumption of volunteer organizations into the party apparatus, a decline in religiosity, the hollowing out of local communities, the normalization of violence, increased dependence on international supply chains: the list goes on. Point is, none of these issues are easily resolved by policy: rebuilding depends on norms and shared commitments.

This task of building isn’t just a matter of designing the right institutions and laws, because at the end of the day those institutions and laws are staffed by and enforced by people. Or, as Tocqueville would put it:

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

Our elites cannot comprehend this because they themselves are totally lacking in morals. The party of Christian nationalism has devolved to little more than a band of drug addicts, pedophiles, and godless cultists interested in religion purely as a tool⁹. Progressives, meanwhile, have rejected the universal moral standards that defined their forbears in favor of a libertine postmodernism.

Should it come as any surprise then why they’ve crumbled in this time of crisis? Fascism as a mass-movement is completely incompatible with the American political tradition¹⁰. Yet it’s been our media and business elites who were the fastest to capitulate and join up with the new administration. We’re witnessing live how the core of resistance to authoritarianism hasn’t come from savvy politicians but spontaneous acts by everyday people.

If we really do see this national project as worth continuing, then that leaves only one option. Rebuild America the way we built it: by first tending to the moral fabric of civil society. Or, to quote Lasch:

A “conservative” respect for order and authority has now become an ingredient of any radical movement that seeks to transcend the progressive and socialist pieties of an earlier time. In mindlessly embracing a politics of “cultural revolution,” the American left has played into the hands of the corporations, which find it all too easy to exploit a radicalism that equates liberation with hedonistic self-indulgence and freedom from family ties.

As the first group of Puritans boarded on a ship for America, they spoke of their task as building “a shining city upon a hill”. Countless politicians since have evoked this line to describe America, but in the process we lost the original meaning of the sentiment. The Puritans did not speak of “greatness” or “exceptionalism” as their entitlement — but rather instead a responsibility. Contrary to what Ronald Reagan tells us, America is not God’s country. God already had a chosen people and he chose to reject them. For John Winthrop, America was not a gift but a test. They had an opportunity right in front of them to build a society, could they build one that was righteous?

Did they build one that was righteous? Perhaps not by the Lord’s standards. But all those things I mentioned in the previous section (utopianism, risk-taking, practicality, religiosity, etc.) are the fruits that came of it. But all those intangible things, more than any statistic or accomplishment, are the lasting markers we have.

Today, we face another test, and the reality is that the American people are the only ones who can be left up to the task. Our institutions are falling apart, our markets are failing, and our leaders rudderless. If we do value this country, we’re not going to save it by “steering the discourse” or playing high-level realpolitik. Instead, civil society has to reassert itself over the political, and the only way to do that is to rediscover and repair the culture we’ve let decay.