Who Still Loves “The Idea of America”?

[This piece will run as an op/ed in newspapers in very “conservative” areas of Virginia in early June, 2026.]

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One of our conservative Supreme Court Justices — Neil Gorsuch — has written a book for children. In honor of the nation’s 250th birthday, Gorsuch wanted to convey something of the beauty of the American ideals expressed in the American Constitution. The book celebrates the kinds of “unalienable rights” and “liberty and justice for all” values that have always been at the center of Conservative America’s civic culture.

Then he got a rude awakening. It turned out he had no idea where many of his friends’ heads were really at.

Gorsuch clearly assumed he was addressing “friends” in the book tour he launched. As described in a striking Salon article by Sophia Tesfaye, Gorsuch made the rounds of MAGA-friendly networks, programs, and institutions that for decades had been part of the mainstream conservative world. He expected those audiences to applaud his patriotic paean to the American constitutional order.

What makes us Americans, Gorsuch said, is this American “creed”: whoever believes in the principles embodied in the Declaration and Constitution can become an American. But to many in his audience, Gorsuch’s celebration of traditional constitutional conservatism made him a traitor.

They saw it as a betrayal because it meant that people from other races, religions, and cultures could come here and be entitled to the same rights and liberties as everyone else.

What Gorsuch discovered was that many of those accusing him of betrayal were operating from a very different idea of what makes someone truly American. For them, what fundamentally makes America America is not adherence to the ideals on which the nation was founded, but being a particular people with particular roots, traditions, religion, and cultural identity.

(The people who insist that America was founded as a Christian nation want the country to conform more to their beliefs, and less to the idea that all religions should enjoy equal standing.)

One can see how, for many people, adherence to political ideals might not create the same powerful sense of Us that people derive from sharing a culture, religion, history, or homeland.

But in our time, whether the nation will adhere to the Constitution has itself become a major battleground. Tens of millions of people now place greater weight on ties of group identity — what Sophia Tesfaye aptly describes as a “blood and soil” vision of America—than on whether their side is attacking the constitutional system itself. The pull of Us-against-Them has proved stronger than the bond of Us — fellow citizens — sharing a constitutional democracy.

The question arises: what has led to this transformation of much of the Republican world, from constitutionalist patriots to soldiers for the predominance of their group over those who are different in race, religion, culture, etc.?

It can’t have helped that, over the past several decades, the American political system has increasingly seemed unable to accomplish much for the American people. In earlier eras, we’ve seen government make great strides in improving the nation, but since, say, the 1990s it has become extraordinarily difficult to enact anything of major importance.

So perhaps the constitutional order itself loses support when the system operating under it no longer seems capable of serving the people well.

(And most people will not be able to see what political force is actually responsible for that paralysis —- so an anti-democratic force can reap political benefits if it succeeds in rendering democratic government ineffective.)

But a major part of the answer also seems to lie in how increasing demographic diversity has shifted power away from groups long dominant in American society. Whites no longer so overwhelmingly outnumber others. Women no longer remain largely excluded from positions of power. And the cultural and religious dominance of America’s long-dominant groups has diminished.

“We used to get our way.” But as the country changes, some will increasingly have to share power with people they once dominated or marginalized.

And so the democratic values that felt admirable when these groups were dominant now begin to lose their appeal when they require acknowledging the power of others.

Which recalls one important part of the answer to the question: Why did the American constitutional order break down into Civil War in 1861?

Then, too, we find the attitude: “The system is great when we’re the winners, but when we’re losers we reject it.”

From the presidency of George Washington through the election of Abraham Lincoln, a hugely disproportionate number of Presidents, Speakers of the House, and Supreme Court justices came from states whose politics and economies were dominated by the slave system.

During those years, the big slaveowners who ruled the South were strongly committed to the constitutional order that gave them dominance.

Then power in America began shifting toward the North. The Industrial Revolution was strengthening the North economically through productive new technologies. And the North was gaining population, and thus representation in Congress, as incoming immigrants, like the Irish, avoided the South where they would have to compete with unpaid slave labor.

But with the election of Lincoln —- determined to contain the expansion of the slave system—the constitutional order no longer sufficiently served their interests. And they chose to break the Covenant that had kept them dominant for generations.

People who’d been patriotic Americans while the system kept them dominant—as Gorsuch is now discovering—can rise up in rebellion against “the idea of America” when they lose their dominance.