A Level of Discourse: Part 2

what is an American and why it matters?

Admittedly, this was the essay I wanted to write first. However, as most things conjured in my mind I needed to travel down a certain length of road before I could get there. Like some route 66 historiographer, I couldn’t possibly get to the titular question in this body of work without first explaining the symptoms for why it’s conjecture even exists in the first place. For those who started here, and for myself; I couldn’t, in good conscious, try to answer the question of “what is an American?” Without putting into record why I even came up with the idea in the first place. So, Let’s continue

WHAT IS AN AMERICAN? AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

The first part of this question was asked to me by a septuagenarian professor of mine when I was a sophomore in college. I make note of his age because my father was asked the same question nearly 40 years earlier by the same professor. “What is an American, in 1789, this new man?” was the singular question that composed Joel Cohen’s introduction to American History final; a question he continued to ask for half a century because he had yet to get an answer he liked. His words.

At the time, I am sure I didn’t give it much thought. With hindsight though, what a question it is/was. Prior to 1789 or 1776, whichever you would like, there was no nationality known as American, they were new. The colonists were for the first time not English and were asked to be no longer Georgian, Nutmegger, or Virginian. The single sentence asked of budding historians was profound beyond our capabilities at the time and I suspect that was the old man’s point; he didn’t expect a perfect answer from teenagers but he hoped that maybe we would endeavor to try.

That was back in 2007.

In 2025 I find myself pondering the question again; my wife and I debating it constructively over coffee more than a few times. Our nationality, it seems, our identity as American’s, both personal and popular, coming under scrutiny and being stretched and labored thin since 2008. The growing bipartisanship of culture and politics seemingly eroding the national identity in favor of preferred color, animal and state. With each widening of the gap between beliefs, identity becomes strained. The once unifying aspects that make us American, seem smaller and less salient. I will even admit I find myself questioning what I have in common with someone from Idaho, Florida, California, or Texas. I ask myself, “Are we even the same, are we unified?” or has the federation of states created the opposite of it’s intentions over a 250 year span?

Another thought crossed my mind though, while trying to convince myself that division rhetoric was not what was needed right now.

We are not going to be as easy to conquer as they think

We aren’t because there is a unifying thing that makes us American, and that is that we have never been ruled. Yes, of course, we were subjects to the King of England for hundred’s of years but that rule was autocratic light with actions ranging from casual dismissal of the royal edicts to out right pirate like behavior. American’s as they were then, British in America, were far more free to govern themselves than anyone within the King’s reach. This casual dismissal of the King and his government became engrained in the founding fathers and anyone else who came of age or was born in the colonies; never having known true British rule. When the Red Coats came it was seen as an affront to the established way of life.

So perhaps that may be our one common uniting “culture”. We do not like to be ruled. The irony in that is we see the “Don’t Tread on Me” swathes laying down in front of the wheel of regression eagerly while the people they so explicitly are afraid of are standing up for themselves as they always have.

The point is, we are not Russia, we are not the DPRK, the PRC or even the new democracies of Europe. Those former three have never known a single month of democratic rule, it is, in effect, in their nature to be ruled, so they accept it. I will take the cheap heat for that comment but frankly, from a sociological stand point it is easier to rule those who are already ruled than to corral those who are not. American’s by and large, have no history of true autocracy to look back on and say “well that’s just always how it’s been” or “well it used to be that way”. What we do have is a history comprised solely of the oppressed and the liberation thereof.

This current administration seems to be taking pages out of the autocratic play book without considering things like population size, collective history and everything I just mentioned.

The historian Gordon Wood said, when asked why colonists rebelled in 1776 that “People act the way they do because of who they are.” That idea has always resonated with me. Wood used it to explain why the common man rebelled, by not trying to give a blanket answer. And he is right. It wasn’t one thing, or two things or any specific thing that rallied the militias and armies of America to fight the British. One man could have finally lost his house to taxes. One man’s son could have been killed by the British in a skirmish. One man could have been forced to leave his home to house soldiers. And so on and so on.

So, when the time comes, and I fear it will come sooner rather than later, for Americans to stand up in mass, it will be because of who we are. So it is with far more confidence than 20 years ago that I answer “what is an American?”

An American is someone who refuses to be ruled within reason insofar as his fellow men are not encumbered. An American fights whether they know they can win or not and cares not the outcome as long as they died trying; if and when it comes to that. To be American is to remember the past as it happened not as it was written; unafraid to self critique and progress forward. An American does not worship any leader or bend to them and most importantly an American doesn’t let fear compromise who they are.

Anyone who flies a don’t tread on me sign, a Trump flag, is pro 2A but for some reason isn’t present currently, anyone who let’s prejudice consume them, and anyone who submits rather than fights, is decidedly not American. And history will remember them as such.

Why does this matter? This definition of an American and what is not an American? Because our identity as a nation is fragile, amorphic and currently weaker than it has ever been. I myself have fallen into the rhetoric that I, a northerner, have nothing in common with the person from Idaho, Texas, or Arizona. And that might be true, from what we like to eat to how we say the word car, but I have everything in common with any person who refuses to be ruled. And all people like that are welcome to be American.

I just want to say, that these ramblings may seem symptomatic of the times and erratic at best but to purge them from my head and maybe, just maybe, offer some comfort to anyone including myself has been cathartic. The road ahead is going to be as hard as we let it be. It may result in a fractured union or worse but in the end I know that we as Americans will separate ourselves from the non-Americans and we will not be ruled.

Bonus Readings

Dorsey, Leroy G. We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple : Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism. Tuscaloosa, The University Of Alabama Press, 2013.

Fukuyama, Francis. Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. London, Profile Books, 2019.

Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? : The Challenges to America’s Identity. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2004.

• THIS BOOK ABOVE IS UTTER DOG SHIT, WRITTEN BY A BORDERLINE NATIONALIST, BUT IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE UNAMERICAN THINKS

Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause : The American Revolution, 1763-1789. New York, Oxford University Press, 2007.