What Makes Someone American? It’s Neither Creed Nor Bloodline—It’s a Spirit

In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country’s founding people and ideas. Read more here.

Obscured by the din of fireworks, rock ‘n’ roll, and raucous revelry, a stubborn and crucial question begs to be answered as we celebrate our Sestercentennial: What is an American?

Historian Gordon Wood has championed a creedal conception of nationality: “To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.” In stark opposition, you’ll find Vice President J.D. Vance’s physical view: “We’re a particular place with a particular people.”

Both views hold a degree of truth, but both fail to capture the essence of American nationality. They are simultaneously over- and underinclusive; the challenge is charting a course between the two that minimizes both false positives and false negatives.

American libertarians are naturally drawn to the creedal view—and not without reason. The founding documents of the United States tend to align with our political philosophy.

Thomas Jefferson practically plagiarized John Locke’s Second Treatise when he wrote the preamble to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Bill of Rights legally enshrined those natural rights in the Constitution, including a reminder that “the enumeration…of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

As President Abraham Lincoln famously put it in the Gettysburg Address, America was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Founders’ insistence on moral and legal equality is a glorious thing. Yet it is not, in itself, either a necessary or a sufficient condition for being an American.

Wood said that being an American is “to believe in something.” The core beliefs in the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and the Second Founding—how political philosopher Harry Jaffa refers to the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments, which fulfilled the Declaration’s promise by extending the protections of the Bill of Rights to all Americans—all revolve around individual liberty. So on a naive creedal account, an American is he who believes in liberty.

By these lights, the classical liberal statesman Daniel Hannan, an ardent defender of political and economic liberty, is an American. But Hannan is not an American; he’s British (and a member of the House of Lords, to boot). Moreover, when asked, Hannan asserts in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t consider himself an American.

Evidently, certain convictions—even those that reflect (most of) the Founders’ political philosophy—do not make an American.

Furthermore, someone can be an American without a strong conviction in the values of liberty. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is no less an American because of his misguided belief in democratic socialism. To suggest otherwise would be to assert that an ideological litmus test can be administered to determine nationality. And that itself is inconsistent with a liberty-based creedal conception of American nationality: Surely the liberties cherished by the American creedalists include freedom of conscience, perhaps the most basic exercise of individual liberty. Moreover, its outward manifestation, speech, is protected by the Bill of Rights.

The physical account of Americanness fails too. What would it mean for only “Heritage Americans”—those who can trace their lineage all the way back to the Revolution, the Mayflower, or some other notable event or person—to truly be American? If we use the 212,000 combined membership of the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution as a rough proxy, only 0.07 percentof the roughly 300 million U.S. citizens would be “real” Americans.

Not even Vance believes in such a genetic conception of nationality. His physical account is partially creedal—the full version of his aforementioned quote is: “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

The Heritage American definition is overinclusive too. Imagine a descendant of Christopher Jones, the Mayflower‘s captain. If he betrayed his former countrymen by selling military secrets to the Chinese Communist Party, the Russian Federation, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, surely he would forfeit his American essence.

If Americanness resides neither in the mind nor the body, where does it exist? Luckily, we do not have to give up the ghost, because that’s precisely where American nationality exists: the spirit.

Plato believed in a tripartite soul. The logistikon (reason) desires truth and properly governs the lower parts of the soul; the thymoeides (spirit) pursues pride, honor, and dignity; and the epithymetikon (appetite) is associated with physical, bodily pleasures. The creedal account is a function of the logistikon, the physical account of the epithymetikon. A spirited account of nationalism—a thumotic account—is more intuitive and attractive than either, especially in the American context.

In The Republic, the three parts of the individual soul are related to different classes within a city—reason to the philosopher-king; the spirit to the guardians; the appetite to the producers. The guardians identify with their polity, about which they feel pride, and with its residents, to whom they are loyal. The guardians are so proud and loyal that, if need be, they are prepared to protect the city with their very lives.

The 19th century philosopher and philologist Ernest Renan expounded on the spiritedness of nationhood in an 1882 essay, “What Is a Nation?” Renan rejected the idea that a nation is simply a state, noting that Turkey included several distinct and conflicting nations within its jurisdiction. Renan also rejected race as the basis for nationhood, saying “that there is no pure race and that to make politics depend upon ethnographic analysis is to surrender it to a chimera.” Moreover, since “Christianity, with its universal and absolute character…formed an intimate alliance with the Roman Empire and, through the impact of these two incomparable unificatory agents, the ethnographic argument was debarred from the government of human affairs.” Renan also dismissed language and geography as similarly arbitrary bases for nationality.

While Renan applauded communities of interest for “bring[ing] about trade agreements,” he thought they were insufficient to make a nation because “nationality has a sentimental side to it; it is both soul and body at once.”

Nationalism, Renan suggested, is that which connects the mind and the body: the spirit. “Nothing purely material suffices for it,” he wrote. “A nation is a spiritual principle.”

Renan argued that the spiritual principle of nationalism comprises two things: “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories,” which accounts for the emphasis on civic education and national history in public schools, and “the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.”

Renan’s account is not jingoistic. He defined nations as sharing not only “a glorious heritage” but “regrets” as well. He went so far as to say that “where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.” Under the Renanian account of nationality, Americans are not merely allowed to recognize our nation’s past and present injustices but must recognize them in order to be true patriots. How else could we chart a path to a more just future for ourselves and our countrymen?

A nation, by Renan’s lights, is “a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.” Simpler still, a nation is “the family with which one unites oneself for life or for death.”

The thumotic account of American nationalism mirrors Renan’s general account of nationhood. It pays no heed to race, religion, creed, language, or immigration status. It includes under the star-spangled banner all who regard the U.S. as their home; all those who feel just pride in the virtuous actions of our shared ancestors and just shame in their moral shortcomings; all those who tear up listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or “Yankee Doodle”; all who would die to defend the American people and our Constitution.

America, as Renan wrote, is “no more soil than it is race….The soil furnishes the substratum, the field of struggle and of labour; man furnishes the soul.” I’d add that the soul, the spirit, is properly directed by reason, and so a thumotic account of nationalism must incorporate a version of the creedal account. The Constitution codifies those foundational beliefs that guide the spirit of American nationalism. Americans, properly called, disagree on policy; but those who would ignore, defy, or deliberately subvert the Constitution are not Americans but domestic enemies.

The incorporation of this creedal component enables the thumotic account to be appropriately exclusive. Those who reject America as their home, who revile our national history and traditions, and who would not defend the nation from attack but aid and abet our adversaries, are not truly American—even if they are natural-born citizens whose ancestors were patriots in the Revolutionary War.

At first blush, the thumotic account may seem illiberal, appearing to rest on a friend/enemy distinction without regard for justice. But the spirit need not produce the genocidal, illiberal nationalism of the early-to-mid 20th century. It is a brute fact of the human psyche; it cannot be eliminated but can be directed toward good or ill. A patriot who identifies with and privileges his fellow countrymen over foreigners is not vicious; to do so is as permissible as it is to prioritize the needs of one’s own children before the needs of strangers. The reverse—to treat everyone as having an equal claim on others’ consideration—would be vicious. Just as it is unjust to treat equals unequally, it is also unjust to treat unequals equally.

To pathologize patriotism is to pathologize an aspect of mankind’s very nature. Because our nature is immutable, reproaching it is foolhardy: Condemning virtuous expressions of the spirit won’t eliminate it but encourage vicious expressions thereof. Namely, an illegitimate, chimerical nationalism that is at once inappropriately inclusive and insufficiently exclusive.

On our 250th anniversary, we must respond to perverted forms of nationalism not by disclaiming nationalism itself or by denying its inevitability but by embracing a properly spirited American nationalism that embraces all who are loyal to the United States.