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Is America an idea? Obviously, the country as such is not a disembodied abstraction. It has territory and a population and long-established institutions. But the question is whether our culture and institutions are based on an idea and defined by an idea.
In his speech [ [link removed] ] explaining his decision not to run for re-election, President Biden answered this question one way: “America is an idea… the most powerful idea in the history of the world. … We are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.” The week before, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance seemed to go in the other direction, declaring, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history,” “a homeland.” He added: “People will not fight for abstractions.”
Vance was straddling the fence a bit, as politicians tend to do, allowing for some role for ideas in America’s identity. But he was widely understood [ [link removed] ] to be making a nod toward the nationalist conservative position that America is not defined by ideas but is instead a set of people, a geographic place, and most of all “specific practices, traditions and customs [ [link removed] ]”—the “experience of intergenerational communities [ [link removed] ].” National Review’s Rich Lowry boils it down, somewhat dubiously, to the Protestant King James Bible [ [link removed] ]. Lord Baltimore could not be reached for comment.
This rejection of America’s ideological roots is supposed to be an appeal to our shared national history—yet ironically it attempts to overturn centuries of American history.
Drinking Coffee with John Adams
The nationalist conservatives begin by overturning the history and tradition of the conservative movement itself. It was Margaret Thatcher who told [ [link removed] ] conservatives at a 1991 meeting at the Hoover Institution that America was “built upon an idea—the idea of liberty,” in remarks that were widely paraphrased as: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
In an early speech, Ronald Reagan declared [ [link removed] ], “America is less of a place than an idea,” and in his famous farewell address in 1989, he was even more emphatic [ [link removed] ]: “America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise.”
Reagan and Thatcher were right. After all, if America was defined by customs and culture, we might not have struck out on our own as an independent country. Our original cultural identity was British, and in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the founders routinely referred to the colonies as “British America [ [link removed] ].” Our ties to Britain and its culture, history and even its monarchy were strong, and we wouldn’t have staged a revolution and begun moving away from that cultural identity if not for those pesky ideas.
Consider, for example, one of our traditional American folkways: our love of coffee. Like all British people, we used to love tea—but in protest against Parliament’s tax on tea, we not only threw the stuff into Boston Harbor, we boycotted tea altogether. In a 1774 letter [ [link removed] ] to his wife, John Adams recalled arriving after a long journey and asking his hostess for tea. “No sir, said she, we have renounced all tea in this place. I can’t make tea, but I’ll make you coffee.” He continues: “Accordingly I have drank coffee every afternoon since and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced.”
Thus began a tax protest we’re still engaged in 250 years later. Americans still drink less than one-eighth as much tea per capita [ [link removed] ] as the British. We changed our habits and customs to conform to our ideals.
In an 1818 letter [ [link removed] ], Adams argued that “the real American Revolution” was a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affection of the people,” and he specifically contrasted this to our traditions and customs.
The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise.
Thus, he recommends the project of “searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people and compose them into an independent nation.” He describes America’s national identity as being forged through a shared ideology.
The Rights of Englishmen Man
But it goes deeper than this. In a recent book [ [link removed] ] that is probably the most detailed deep dive into the Declaration of Independence, Clemson University historian Brad Thompson describes a fascinating evolution in the American debate leading up to the Revolution, a transformation “from the traditional rights of Englishmen to the rights of nature.”
The Americans began by appealing to the rights of Englishmen, a narrow conception of rights as the customary privileges obtained by a certain people based on history and tradition. But when these appeals were rebuffed, they started to take a more philosophical approach.
It was in reaction to the Sugar and Stamp Acts that American revolutionaries discovered, as William Pierce put it in an oration, “how to define the rights of nature—how to search into, to distinguish, and to comprehend, the principles of physical, moral, religious, and civil liberty.” From the beginning of the imperial crisis, declared Joseph Warren, the “attempt of the British Parliament to raise a revenue from America, and our denial of their right to do it, have excited an almost universal enquiry into the rights of mankind in general.”
It became commonplace for passages from John Locke and other liberal philosophers to be printed in newspapers across America. After a while, they were printed without attribution because by that point everybody knew where the quotations were from. After a few years of this, American stopped talking about the “rights of Englishmen” and started talking about “the rights of man.” They went from the specific and traditional to the abstract and universal.
By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote these universal principles into the Declaration of Independence, he could honestly say that they expressed the “common sense of the subject,” a viewpoint universally accepted by the founders of the new nation.
A New Birth of Freedom
In his speech, J.D. Vance describes having ancestors “born around the time of the Civil War” just before stating that “people will not fight for abstractions.” But the Civil War was fought over abstractions.
To be sure, the Confederacy was fighting for its local folkways and traditions, its “peculiar institution.” By contrast, in the Gettysburg Address, when Abraham Lincoln set out to rally the nation to rededicate itself to a costly and brutal war that was still unfinished, he described America as a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
I can’t imagine how the nationalist conservatives account for the Civil War. Do they think we were fighting each other over differences in our accents or customs? Only a large and fundamental ideological issue—the contradiction between slavery and the principles of the founding of the United States—could have prompted such a massive national bloodletting.
When they say that no one fights for an abstraction, the nationalists are implicitly assuming that ideas are empty of content, mere hot air without substance. (They can speak for themselves on that, I suppose.) But according to the empiricist philosophy that was widely accepted in the founding era, abstractions are based on and refer to concrete facts. When we fought the American Revolution over the abstraction of “liberty,” we were fighting over the very substantial issues of taxes and representation and government power. When we fought the Civil War over the abstraction of “equality,” we were fighting over the very concrete reality of millions of innocent people held in cruel bondage.
Also consider the implication of those people’s release from bondage. If America were only a “people”—well, the largest one-day expansion in the people of America was the passage of the 14th Amendment and its recognition of the citizenship of 4 million former slaves. In this case, it is the American ideal of equality that literally helped create the American people.
The Civil War has often been described as a kind of second founding of America, as integral to its history as the first founding. Much of our subsequent history flows from it. There is a direct line from Locke’s theory of individual rights to the Declaration of Independence, to the Civil War, and finally to Martin Luther King Jr. evoking these same ideas in support of the Civil Rights Movement.
There is no coherent account of American history that does not recognize the central role of liberal ideas in shaping everything else.
TV Land Politics
The fact that America was founded on ideas rather than specific traditions or customs also explains the cultural dynamism that is characteristic of America and essential to its greatness. All the way back in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the American philosophical method,” our habitual way of approaching the world.
To escape from imposed systems, the yoke of habit, family maxims, class prejudices, and to a certain extent national prejudices as well; to treat tradition as valuable for information only and to accept existing facts as no more than a useful sketch to show how things could be done differently and better; to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason of things.
This is why we’ve been able to expand so far geographically, spanning from coasts to mountains to plains, and from tropics to desert to tundra. This is why we’ve been able to absorb, from the very beginning, people from so many clashing backgrounds and different faiths—from Ireland to Eastern Europe to Africa and Asia. It’s why we have happily absorbed and appropriated everybody’s cuisine, from the once-exotic pie [ [link removed] ] known as “pizza” to tacos and beyond. Because America has never been defined by the attempt to preserve a static way of life, we have been able to adapt to constant economic and technological change, producing entirely new cultural movements along the way.
Nationalist conservatives want to take this great, dynamic nation and freeze its identity at one imaginary point in time, usually an idealized TV Land version of 1960 [ [link removed] ]. They want to stop it at lemonade stands, Chevrolet cars and Norman Rockwell paintings [ [link removed] ] (which just illustrates their ignorance of their own traditions, because Rockwell was a notable liberal [ [link removed] ]). In their view, we will maintain the traditions, the customs, the folkways—and the ethnic and racial composition [ [link removed] ]—that we had then. This is a narrow-minded philosophy of stasis.
Rejecting the dynamism of American society reflects the basic contradiction of the nationalist conservatives. They are trying to conserve a culture that was based on a liberal tradition. They are trying to reduce a nation founded on universal ideas into a nation of static, concrete customs.
To do this is to destroy America in the name of preserving it.

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