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21st Century Americanism: What it is and where it comes from
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very proud to be American, they have a wide-ranging – and somewhat contradictory – set of concerns in mind. These concerns have a long history in American political culture (some longer than others) and have been promoted at various times at all levels of government. Citizens themselves, in other words, should not be chastised for genuinely supporting seemingly inconsistent ideas about what being American means. Most Americans view American identity as consisting of liberal and civic republican principles. They also view the United States as an immigrant society that converts the challenges of immigration into strengths, and they feel that Americans should take steps to form a common identity while still preserving the diversity that makes America so different from all other countries. And there are still some Americans that define the content of American identity in narrow ascriptive terms. We have, in other words, a snapshot of the set of norms and values Americans look to when they assess the meaning of their national identity, when they take stock of America’s place in the world, whey they form expectations about how their fellow Americans will (and should) act, and when they try to determine appropriate responses to new political and social controversies. Such snapshots are essential for tracking how Americans will continue to define being American as today’s young immigrant population changes, as immigrants bear children on American soil, and as new waves of immigrants arrive.
In the end, we have a long and complex set of survey questions that we are still just
beginning to understand. They do not all form coherent scales in ways that I expected them to, nor can they be reduced to a single neat “Americanism” measure. But this complexity also brings insight. The contours of the causes and consequences of how people define American identity will continue to be studied with this complexity in mind. An important next step, for example, is to look at how the different clusters of norms and values discussed here shape how people feel about salient immigration-related debates, such as whether government documents should be provided in multiple languages and whether racial profiling is an acceptable counter-terrorism law enforcement tactic. In other words, how does the understanding of content presented here shape how people determine what kinds of government action are appropriate ways of dealing with salient social and political issues, especially issues related to race and ethnicity? Before getting to such analyses, we must define and measure the content of American national identity. A goal of the analysis here was to get us closer to that point.
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| | Authors: Schildkraut, Deborah. |
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very proud to be American, they have a wide-ranging – and somewhat contradictory – set of
concerns in mind. These concerns have a long history in American political culture (some longer
than others) and have been promoted at various times at all levels of government. Citizens
themselves, in other words, should not be chastised for genuinely supporting seemingly
inconsistent ideas about what being American means. Most Americans view American identity
as consisting of liberal and civic republican principles. They also view the United States as an
immigrant society that converts the challenges of immigration into strengths, and they feel that
Americans should take steps to form a common identity while still preserving the diversity that
makes America so different from all other countries. And there are still some Americans that
define the content of American identity in narrow ascriptive terms. We have, in other words, a
snapshot of the set of norms and values Americans look to when they assess the meaning of their
national identity, when they take stock of America’s place in the world, whey they form
expectations about how their fellow Americans will (and should) act, and when they try to
determine appropriate responses to new political and social controversies. Such snapshots are
essential for tracking how Americans will continue to define being American as today’s young
immigrant population changes, as immigrants bear children on American soil, and as new waves
of immigrants arrive.
In the end, we have a long and complex set of survey questions that we are still just
beginning to understand. They do not all form coherent scales in ways that I expected them to,
nor can they be reduced to a single neat “Americanism” measure. But this complexity also brings
insight. The contours of the causes and consequences of how people define American identity
will continue to be studied with this complexity in mind. An important next step, for example, is
to look at how the different clusters of norms and values discussed here shape how people feel
about salient immigration-related debates, such as whether government documents should be
provided in multiple languages and whether racial profiling is an acceptable counter-terrorism
law enforcement tactic. In other words, how does the understanding of content presented here
shape how people determine what kinds of government action are appropriate ways of dealing
with salient social and political issues, especially issues related to race and ethnicity? Before
getting to such analyses, we must define and measure the content of American national identity.
A goal of the analysis here was to get us closer to that point.
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