America is Awesome

I just watched the U.S. men’s national team for a sport I don’t especially like win a thrilling, short-handed victory in the World Cup. The first goal was scored by a man who was born here apparently by accident, to tourist parents—exactly the “anchor baby” of white nationalist fever dreams—and the second was scored by a man born in Germany to a German mother and American father. Both of them are American citizens contributing their rare talents to our national team, and that’s awesome. Birthright citizenship, which was vindicated by the Supreme Court by a disgracefully narrow margin this week, is literally one of the things that makes America great. The people who are seething about it—calling to “put a bedsheet over the Statue of Liberty” or to amend the constitution to undo the 14th amendment—are merely parading their national self-loathing. Ten years ago this sentiment was functionally unknown in elite politics or among elected officials. Now veteran Senator Mike Lee is talking about the 14th amendment as though it were the craziest thing ever imagined rather than a fundamental bedrock of our country’s greatness.

I take this outrage more to heart than I do some others because I grew up surrounded by people who were born to parents on student visas, people who make the country better for everyone, and it fills me with an ungodly rage to think that some self-appointed “heritage Americans” want them to have been non-citizens, or even stateless people, from birth. And I take it more to heart because the 14th amendment is such a marvelous thing in itself, crafted in part to undo the monstrosity that was Dred Scott and restore American law to its common-law roots, in which both the privileges and duties of citizenship came automatically with the jus soli.1 I am genuinely proud of this achievement, organized by some of the greatest statesmen in our history, mandated upon rebellious states as a condition of their return to the Union, and upheld, against all odds, by one of the lousier Courts in the whole lousy history of Supreme Courts when federal law attempted to create a “no Chinese” exception to the birthright provision. When I wrote my July Christian Century column earlier in the year, I was not mindful that a Supreme Court case testing the validity of the plain text of the 14th amendment would be decided shortly before our national anniversary, but I included it in my litany of things I love about America:

I’ve been focusing on what I think of as my Ken Burns patriotism: I love jazz, baseball, Union generals in the Civil War, national parks, the civil rights movement. I love local public libraries, a legacy of America’s unique strain of do-gooding busybodies who wanted everyone to read. I love our literary tradition, which isn’t centered in one or two big cities, a dominant ethnic group, or the social elite but reflects and refracts our intrinsic hybridity. I love the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, with their lawyer’s theology of universal freedom, citizenship, and access to the franchise.

Read the whole thing here.

I find it helpful to break down my country into these discrete objects of appreciation. The blood-and-soil nationalist types approach to some kind of truth by saying that love is love for something specific rather than abstract. But their “localism” is fundamentally imaginary, the longing for a pure volk inhabiting the kind of rude homesteads a man can take in at one sweeping glance after pushing his hat brim back a bit, accepting a cool class of laudanum-laced clabber from his long-frocked wife, and being bitten by a malaria-bearing mosquito.2 Actually existing American specificity and localism have always been networked and hybridized. American “trads” want something like the Shire, but even Tolkien’s fantasy land has the fruits of trade (coffee, tea, sugar, “pipe weed”) and industry (lots of flatware) unknown in England during the real old days. America is wagon trains and railroads, tow paths and highways, musical forms with no single point of origin, literature of movement, encounter, and transformation. The people who resent birthright citizenship don’t just despise America as it has become, they despise what it has always been. It’s not some kind of huge accident that two of our towering novels of the 19th century recount water journeys, down the Mississippi and around the world, taken by motley crews of characters. Still less that our greatest 20th century novelists hailed not just from Boston or Philadelphia or the genteel precincts of Manhattan but from places like Lorrain, Ohio, New Albany, Mississippi, and Oak Park, Illinois.

I don’t know how “exceptional” this makes us. Dig a little bit into the histories of many nations and civilizations and you find stories of in-gathering from places and tribes, to say nothing of ranging, wandering, war, displacing and being displaced. Rome’s origin story, however repellent, is less appalling and implausible than Athens’s. Perhaps the spasm of disgust we are witnessing toward our founding ethos and institutions is just a turn of history’s wheel, as we move from our “exceptional” phase with all its grandiose and horrible energy into a shabby decline of battling over ruins.

That would be a tragedy. But I don’t think it’s inevitable. American greatness is so deeply embedded in our national psyche that our super-patriots and our super-dissenters appear as negative images of each other. The first insist on the immaculate and invincible nature of the nation, the second seem to think that we invented history’s evils for the sake of imposing them on a spotless continent and then a spotless world. They are joined in their fixation on national innocence, one holding our land to be a type of Eden, the other claiming the apple and its curse as our unique possession. During the World Cup I saw some crowing about the poor showing of “colonizers” in the first knockout games, and wondered if people might find the Wikipedia page for Morocco illuminating. “America is bad because Europeans migrated here” and “America is bad because non-Europeans migrate here” are deeply connected claims with intolerably self-wounding implications. Down both paths lie madness.

Nobody gets an excuse note from History, not even us, and to keen and caper for one before the schoolmistress of our myths can only distract us from what we might learn and love here and now. We might choose the path of grateful, hopeful humility rather than one despair or other. We have a lot to treasure and preserve in the work of these wandering generations, and we are fortunate that to treasure and preserve those things means, almost by definition, to build and expand them. That’s the promise secreted within the dry language of the 14th amendment—more creativity, more amalgamation, more invention, more beauty, more weird Christianities, more “new religious movements,” more shots on goal, more people, more Americans.

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I don’t do it a lot but I enjoy writing in a patriotic vein.

Last year I attempted a vindication of the Declaration of Independence for the Fourth of July, concluding that our innovations in presidential power suggested that we owe George III an apology:

That our founding, for all its hypocrisies and imperfections, begins with an idea of universal human equality and inalienable rights is an enduring consequential fact. We fought a whole Civil War over it, as Lincoln explained when he quoted the Declaration at Gettysburg. We were to be a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

This conception and dedication are under direct and explicit attack. Today’s would-be heirs of Lincoln claim the US as just another “nation-state,” a country founded and nurtured not on the premise of universal human rights and equality but on blood and soil. That we are just another “homeland,” in J. D. Vance’s peroration at the 2024 Republican Convention, just another “group of people with a shared history,” like all the places my own ancestors decided to leave. It is probably not a coincidence that the “idea” or “creed” of America is being defined out of our history at the very moment it is being disparaged in practice.

In 2024, I tried to defend the idea of republican citizenship against the god-king presidency invented by the Court in the immunity case:

That we had created a behemoth at the heart of our political order was, at best, a necessary embarrassment to legal and political thinkers. But the slender reed on which the legitimacy of this office rested was the person of the president himself: while vested with enormous power, he was merely a man, subject to the law. Inside the godlike machine was a mere citizen, who must emerge after a term in office and join the common run of humanity.

It seems that we are about to lose this last conceptual firewall between a republican presidency and an elected monarchy. The Court’s liberals vainly pointed out that the framers of the Constitution knew about immunity clauses and chose not to write one for the president. This does not matter to the Court’s supposedly “textualist” and “originalist” majority. Something they called the “structure” of our political order requires that presidents stand above and outside it. By the end of the argument, it would not have been more surprising if Justice Alito had warned that the rains might fail and the crops wither if a president were subjected to the laws of the republic.

And way back in 2013, I wrote about a summer vacation that turned into a civil-religion pilgrimmage:

We had just seen a facsimile of Roosevelt’s first inaugural address. At the top of the typed manuscript he penciled in an introduction: “This is a day of consecration.” A couple hundred words later is this typed line: “Plenty is at our doorstep”—even in the Depression—“but a vast use of it languishes.” Here Roosevelt crossed out vast and penciled in generous. In one flick of the wrist, he traded the modern language of industrial production for an Old Testament idiom of liberality in the face of need. Sanctity, I saw, was harder to escape than I had expected.

Have a great holiday, and thanks again for reading.