Can America Exist Without A Shared Culture?

Reflections on national narratives

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (Getty)

I’m in a conservative country at the moment. People do things like brush their hands over their faces after a meal as a way of saying thanks; and cook meals that take hours; and have a very particular wistful tone in their voices whenever they speak about their national heroes; and discuss historical tragedies that occurred maybe hundreds of years ago without a trace of irony or distance. There’s a way that certain intricate questions get refereed back to a “national character,” to some idea that this is just the way we are. There’s a sense also that the culture is intact and outlasts all superimposed foreign influences. The Soviet influence is rapidly withering away and even Islam, although more tenacious, seems never really to have broken through to the heart of the culture.

The worst part of being here, by far, is the American music in cafes. It’s Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift, I don’t even know what. The sense is that there’s a certain imperialistic homage-paying going on. Everybody knows that American culture is the thing now, so coffee shops, bars, malls, etc, dutifully pipe it in. People seem to be curious to talk to me about this side of American culture that feels fresh and world-striding — Eminem, Kanye West, Lady Gaga — and it seems hard to explain somehow that it’s not actually much of a culture for us either. The music, the movies, are an industry — they’ll be recycled out and in a few years nobody will listen to Lady Gaga any more than we listen to Cyndi Lauper now.

What’s hard to explain — and I’m only thinking in these terms because I’m outside America — is that there simply isn’t an intact cultural core to the US, some agreed-upon national identity the way that there is in many (most?) other places. Whenever I’m abroad, the question I get asked most often and most searchingly (I can always feel it forming) is “what is your nationality?” My response — “well, a European mix, 3/8ths this, 1/8th that, although everybody has been in America for four generations” — has never once been close to satisfying to anyone (although once when I say “Jewish” that usually takes care of this topic). What everybody seems to be after is that nugget of national identity. Most people around the world seem to have it, and the US is seen as anomalous and a bit flimsy for lacking that core cohesion.

I was thinking about this from another angle through Yascha Mounk’s interview of Colin Woodard. Woodard came up with the theory that the US is really composed of about eleven different ‘nations,’ each with its own mentality — and that that split in outlook helps to account for much of our schizophrenic politics.

Seen in that light, American history comes to seem like a grasping search for consensus — an ever-capsizing ship attempting to balance on some even axis. The first, most famous consensus is, of course, the period of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And the sense there is that the consensus was surprisingly thin — rooted in shared economic interests and cultural signifiers among an upper-crust. Historians of the early American Republic delight in pointing out how divided the early years really were, with even a word like “democracy” far from universally agreed-upon as a positive trait. And in the sort of schoolbook version of American history that we all grew up on, with America as the preeminent American democracy, it’s often somehow forgotten that Hamilton was very close to a coup in 1783, that the republic appeared to be hopelessly riven by factions by the 1790s, that Congress was essentially held hostage by the South from the 1840s onwards, and that the whole thing collapsed into a horrible, bloody civil war in 1860.

The next consensus was maybe even more threadbare. If the first consensus was largely a cult of George Washington, the next was the cult of Lincoln. It emphasized that, all appearances to the contrary, the republic had actually remained intact, that the Civil War was in fact a means of self-perfecting (of achieving the “more perfect union”), with the slavery question, which had unfortunately been tabled in 1787 now decisively settled. That consensus became an article of liberal faith but didn’t necessarily catch hold — with a congressional plurality unwilling to stick with and impose Reconstruction.

Woodard actually argues that the first full national consensus didn’t come until around 1920, which he calls the “ethnonational” consensus. “That's when we first had a consensus point, and it wasn't a good one,” Woodard says. This seems to be pushing the date pretty far forward, but Woodard, I guess, is thinking of Birth of a Nation and World War I and cowboy westerns and Babbitt — a kind of regressive national consensus that emphasized the triumph on the frontier combined with dawning triumphs overseas and bolstered by old-fashioned middle class values. The American tropes come from roughly this period: “as American as”…. apple pie, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and so on.

That consensus collides rudely with a different consensus which Woodard calls the “civic national narrative” — with Brown v. Board of Ed as a neat refutation of Plessy v. Ferguson, with the ‘60s as anti-matter to the ‘50s, and with all the homey touches of the “white ethnonationalist” consensus suddenly exposed as stark racism and reactionary bad faith.

That “civil rights consensus” (or “civic national narrative”) is what seemed to hold for about fifty years. The ethnonationalist narratives were out (at a certain point, it was even difficult to watch old movies or TV shows for all the racist tropes), and the belief was that America’s core strength was precisely its diversity, its immigrant heritage, its lack of any core culture. The “melting pot” (or the more PC “multiculturalism”) was the expression of that idea. It was a sort of proud thing to be asked the “what’s your nationality?” question by somebody from a different country and to say something like “I’m a mix — like most Americans.” And the assumption was that these mono cultures with their ancient histories and their nuggets of identity were less cohesive than they thought they were — any nation state was bound to have ethnic minorities and the dominant cultures seemed to be constantly getting into fights with if not trying to eradicate the ethnic minorities.

But the story of the 2010s and 2020s appears to be the erosion of the “civil rights consensus.” There are many versions of what happened. There’s the rise of a chauvinistic right. There’s the focus on, if not obsession with, identity among liberals and progressives. There’s what Vincent Lloyd calls the black community’s search for “black justice outside of the existing institutions’ paradigms.” The idea (and this actually remains baffling to me) is that there was something wrong with the diversity vision — that it glossed over too much, that it camouflaged the real workings of power in too many different ways, that it basically was disingenuous.

Both right and left seem eagerly to be looking for “new myths,” a new consensus. For the right, famously, that’s MAGA, the lost golden age of Donald Trump’s filthy rich childhood, when there were square-jawed men on TV and cowboys winning every gunfight with the Indians (and his daddy was every once in a while marching with the Klan). For the left, it’s a bit murkier, but there’s a set of ideas circulating among the liberal minority of the Supreme Count, among a figure like Samuel Moyn, that’s a sort of counter-originalism, that basically argues that the founding ideas of the country are illegitimate because they preceded emancipation and suffrage, that it becomes possible to achieve any sort of legitimate consensus only with the 13th to 15th amendments and then, possibly, only with Brown and with civil rights.

Everything about this way of thinking strikes me as a bad idea, not least because of the set of reflections that I’ve started the piece with. America — unlike many places — isn’t actually rooted in a core culture. (When is the last time, for instance, that you saluted the flag or had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? And it would feel very strange to say “we do such and such because of our American mentality, our American traditions, etc.”) The culture, as such, is probably really rooted in capitalism and in a hyper-charged habit of recycling and rebooting all of our cultural signifiers. In terms of finding any sort of ballast, that does make us uniquely dependent on our founding institutions (on the Constitution, above all). Without agreement on those shared institutions (the legacy of that shoehorned first consensus) we may find ourselves with far less in common than we would have supposed.

As usual for pieces I write, this is all by way of thinking out loud. What’s striking me at the moment is that many other nation-states around the world exist through reference to some shared cultural identity. We don’t necessarily have that, which may be just as well. But our collective identity is — as Woodard suggests — a bit more precarious than rosy views of American history would tend to suggest. It’s still a very new culture. The sense of consensus tends to be elusive. And that may be a useful reminder (especially for the Moyn-ish urge to start redrafting the Constitution) to not fiddle with the underlying institutions that we have.

Sam Kahn writes

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