What is the essence of American identity? Of all the problems that threaten the American project, be they related to national security, climate change, or the national debt, the question what it means to be an American may be the most vital.
The perennial challenge and virtue of our national experiment has been to forge an overarching American identity through societal interactions of vastly divergent groups of people. This is not just a cultural challenge but also a psychological one: Our ability (or inability) to identify with those who are different from ourselves. Yet, the challenge of American identity looks different today, in an age of multiculturalism and identity politics, than in decades past. If we are to set the conditions for a more unified national identity, we have to reckon with the unique difficulties confronting our ability to weave the American people together through shared cultural narratives.
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