With tonight’s first presidential debate looming, along with a high-stakes future election, I’m thinking a lot about what it means to be American. Or should I call us the United States?
That right there seems to be the first hiccup in the current social wars. Trump famously calls this country America. Biden more often refers to us as the United States. The difference seems small, but I think it’s telling and points to the collective identity crisis we’re undergoing as citizens.
America speaks of the continent, of the land, of purple mountains majesty from sea to shining sea. A lot of rural folks support Trump. In this context, his vision makes sense. America is manifest destiny writ large. It’s the economic riches found in our natural resources—in minerals, and animals, in oil, coal, corn, and timber—and the opportunistic titans of industry who arrived here as nobodies and made themselves into wealthy men.
America is cowboys, and combines, and Hollywood, and the Statue of Liberty with her torch and huddled masses. It’s state and county fairs, and football on Friday nights, and pride in our military, and country music, and rock-and-roll. America is blue jeans, and boots, and bootstraps, too.
But America is also slave markets, and tribal reservations, and swindled land, an industrialized prison system, and witch trials. The shadier side of America is a swamp of colonial appropriation and cultural gaslighting. That’s the painful fissure at the heart of America’s glamour, the truth no one wants to bring up at the dinner table. America is like a very beautiful woman wearing someone else’s clothes. We are not indigenous to the land that has made us great.
In contrast, The United States is a nation, not a country. There are and have been many United States throughout our history. We started out as thirteen colonies, then just kept adding more territory through wars and clever deals. For a moment in time, we thought maybe we should break up, that the idea of a federation had run its course, but we stuck it out, collecting even more souls and regions along the way. We’re constantly revising who gets what in terms of rights, land, money, opportunties. The problematic truth at the center of the United States is that while it’s founded on an excellent premise—that all men are created equal—we didn’t really mean it for absolutely everyone, but we said it and now can’t take it back.
The United States is the federal government, the branches of the military, the shady operations of the CIA, our stockpile of nuclear weapons, vaccines, oil. The United States is a centralized banking system, all of the county, state, and federal courts, Congress, and the President. If America goes to NFL games, major league baseball, and monster truck rallies, the United States goes to the Olympics. America is a land of churches. The United States is a place where you can worship whoever or whatever you want. While you are an American, you are a citizen of the United States. The first term implies an identity, the second requires a social contract.
In spite of everything, I still love this country, even with its shame, and hustle, contention, and for all its promise. My great-grandmother came here from Ukraine. She never saw her family again. No one did—many of them were carted off to gulags by Stalin. I’m the first person in my maternal family to get a college degree, never mind a PhD. I don’t know what my life would be like if my people had remained in Ukraine. But I also have an indigenous ancestor, a Lenape woman. I often wonder about her. Once, the Lenape occupied Manhattan. Now, they are a nation in exile in Oklahoma. They were given an unholy choice: keep their culture and lose their land or lose their tribal indentity and gain tenous citizenship in a nation they didn’t found. The strange mix of my blood is the story of America and the United States that’s still being played out today. If I can’t pick a side between indigenous rights and immigrants, between with liberty and justice for all and in god we trust, it’s because I’m all of it all at once.
In his book Hidden Potential, Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, writes that “It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants.” Maybe that’s precisely the shift we need to make. Somewhere along the recent line, it seems like we’ve lost the ability to do what got us into this place of disquiet in the first place, which is to invent ourselves, but in the specific context of each other. We are only as good as our neighbors, and that’s true whether you live on a thousand-acre ranch or in a tiny walk-up apartment. If your neighbor poisons the stream you both drink from, you’re going to be thirsty, too.
It turns out that the national anthem doesn’t mention either the United States or America. Instead, it simply calls us the land of the free and the home of the brave. The Pledge of Allegiance, though—that calls us the United States of America. It’s such a tiny little word to do such mighty work. Two letters to knit together the physical and philosphical, the rural and urban, liberal and conservative. As I watch the debate tonight, I will keep it in mind. Because for better or for worse, like it or not, we are a nation of. We are a country that’s also a land, an uneasy mix of native and new, and above all, a government for the people, by the people, of the people. We embody a binary, but we are more than that. Or we have to try to be.
I suppose that going forward we will see what this means to people. Whether America prevails, with its insistence on individualzed rights but also on social conformity, its attitude of like-it-or-leave-it, and its emphasis on god and country, or if the United States does, with its Byzantine ranks of governance, its global meddling, its systems of power and institutions. We can joke about one other, question one another, hurl insults toward one other, fight one other, throw public tantrums, or quit speaking altogether, but the terrible conundrum that is the founding principal of this country still remains: United, we stand. Divided, we fall. Whatever happens, we will have only ourselves to blame.