It seems every day someone brings up how divided America has become—how we’ve never been so at odds with one another. Now, anyone who has spent even a little time studying American history knows that we’ve seen far worse. Division is nothing new here. But it does feel new, and that feeling has been hashed and rehashed in countless discussions about polarization, identity politics, and all the ways we’re failing one another. I’m not here to re-litigate those discussions. Instead, I want to focus on the core American idea: what it actually means to be an American.
Before you come at me with critiques about personal identity politics, the tragedies of American history, or the shortcomings of the Founding Fathers, I’m going to ask you to set all that aside for a moment. I know that’s a tall order, but trust me: it’s not because I think those issues don’t matter. It’s precisely because they do matter that I want to talk about the big ideas that were supposed to shape this nation. To do that, let’s step back to the time right after the Enlightenment, when the world was ruled by monarchs claiming God-given authority and when bold thinkers began imagining new ways of governing.
Those thinkers debated, studied, and argued over historical forms of government, looking at the Greek and Roman experiments that ranged from full democracies to various styles of republic. By the time the American colonies established themselves, they were keenly aware that a balance was needed between individual freedom and collective responsibility. They saw that anarchy—absolute freedom without any rules—would inevitably lead to chaos. They also knew that too much government power could destroy the very liberty they valued.
When our founders chose a republic, it wasn’t just because the slow travel of information made direct democracy unwieldy. Sure, that played a role. But more importantly, the founders feared what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call the “tyranny of the majority.” In a pure democracy, the majority can easily crush the freedoms of a minority—whether that minority is defined by race, religion, ideology, or just an unpopular opinion. A representative republic, in theory, provides a system of checks and balances that can protect all citizens, not just the most powerful or popular.
By historical standards, they did a remarkable job. The United States remains the longest-lasting republic in world history. But yes, they got many things profoundly wrong: they failed to consider women and people of non-European origin as equals, among other injustices. The truth is, the various European groups in the colonies—English, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, Irish, German, and so on—could barely tolerate each other’s cultural, religious, and linguistic differences at that time. That doesn’t excuse racism, sexism, or other forms of exclusion; it simply shows that what seems obvious to us now was not so obvious to them then.
We do know better now. So the question becomes: how do we keep that original core—maximum liberty while preserving a functional republic—and make it work for everyone? In my view, we need to revisit the way we represent people. One idea is to reorganize state boundaries based on city centers, or to create a much larger House of Representatives so that smaller groups have a genuine voice. The more voices we have at the table, the more difficult it is to reduce the country to a simple “right vs. left” standoff. That’s the messy, and yet also beautiful, heart of a republic: getting a wide spectrum of people heard, so that the tyranny of any majority is kept in check.
Ultimately, being American is about striving for the greatest amount of freedom possible, while still agreeing to certain rules that keep us from descending into chaos. It’s about creating—and continually improving—a framework in which even the loneliest soul has some hope of living free from oppression and free to be themselves, so long as they aren’t harming others. It’s an idea that demands cooperation and compromise but promises incredible rewards: not just liberty for some, but liberty for all.
Now, that might seem idealistic, even naïve. But in times like these, when it feels as though we’re more divided than ever, maybe a dose of idealism is exactly what we need. Our republic was founded on a radical, rebellious notion: that human beings, in all our diversity, can find ways to govern ourselves without trampling the rights of others. For all our differences and all our shortcomings, that is what it means to be American—and it’s worth fighting for.
