I agree with Dr. Gordon S. Wood that America is a “creedal nation” or, as G. K. Chesterton put it more than a century ago, a nation founded on a creed. It is not an ethnic state like Denmark or even a cultural one like France.
The problems that we face today are that a significant number of our own citizens reject the creed and we have the largest non-citizen population of any time in our history many of whom have never embraced that creed. It bears mentioning that even ethnic states and cultural ones are fraying at the edges under the pressures of mass migration.
I have no idea how a creedal nation can survive under such circumstances.
Or indeed ethnic or cultural nations!
The groups that reject the creedal nation do so on racial/ethnic lines. So, we have African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, American Indians, Hindus, a large majority of recent Third World immigrants, and even a substantial fraction of American Jews who evaluate all issues using racial/ethnic criteria. I emphasize “American”, because the people doing this are native Americans, born, raised, and educated here.
Creedalism is inherently a white upper class/upper middle class ideology. It is about as WASPy as you can get. This point is important now, and it will become virtually the only political issue in 20 years or so when whites are a minority.
Our universities no longer teach anything about nationalism and its political consequences. When I was in college in the early 60’s, the courses on poli sci emphasized nationalism in explaining the run up to WW I and its aftermath. In that discourse, nationalism was inherently racial and ethnic. Racialism (nationalism) is what caused the war and the collapse of the multinational empires. This, by the way, is why European governments actively suppress nationalist parties like Germany’s AfD.
This bodes ill for the future of the US and our political system, since we’re a typical multiracial empire. The recent murder of a young white woman on Chicago’s public transit system by immolation by a black man, and the stabbing death of another young white woman by anther black man in DC public transit illustrate the problem and our future.
Lee Kwan Yew explained the problem some time ago.
I think your quotation marks should be around “educated” rather than “American”.
It doesn’t help that our education system actively works to undermine the American creed.
The irony is that the U. S. public education system was literally established to inculcate the American creed in the children of immigrants.
For years universities taught the myths about our creed. Then they taught the truths and people realized that we have fallen fall short of the ideals in our founding documents. Not only did we fall short but different groups have benefitted or been harmed more by maintaining the myths. I would also note that at least among all of the groups being listed here I have known quite a few among my time both in the military and at work, church and private life. I think they hold to those beliefs iterated in the Dec. of Independence, etc pretty strongly, they are just more likely to be aware of where we have fallen short. While acknowledging the massive improvements for women and POC, they are more likely to be aware of areas of remaining issues.
As an example, white males who have benefited are intensively aware of and track every killing of a white person by a black person but seem totally unaware of the hundreds of years when the opposite was the norm and was somewhere between punishment free and lauded. Or that it still happens but only when caught on a video or something similar happens to raise public awareness is there a response.
Of note, this far from just being race or sex based. There is also a real element of wealth inequality that undercuts the creedal belief of justice, equality and the pursuit of happiness.
Steve