So what is an American?
People of diverse political stripes have lately invoked the ghost of Sen. John McCain — which has barely had time to escape his mortal remains — to bless one agenda or another. Then last Wednesday, an anonymous senior White House official turned NYT editorialist joined the chorus, asking in McCain’s name for “everyday citizens” to shed their partisan labels “in favor of a common one: Americans.” Reading these words on air the other night, Rachel Maddow pronounced herself perplexed: “I mean, being an ‘American’ does not exactly come with a set of instructions.”
My high school required a tenth grade civics/history class called “What is an American?” It featured eyewitness accounts of the American Revolution, contemporary racist justifications for slavery, and original sources on the Civil War. The question in the course title wasn’t meant to have a single answer, or perhaps any answer at all. It was the 1970s, and everything was, you know, relative. A conservative might argue that this cultural relativity was exactly the problem leading us down the path to Rachel Maddow’s peaked eyebrows.
Still, relativity is baked into McCain’s patriotism, in the same sense that it’s minted into every coin we carry in our pockets, with the words E Pluribus Unum. The phrase derives from Cicero: “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many (unus fiat ex pluribus).” Of course, the actual practice of such selfless love is as common in today’s politics as, well, quoting Cicero. In the original Latin. While wearing a toga.
It’s more common to understand the phrase as celebrating diversity: the elixir of our one-ness flowing from the fountains of our many-ness. It’s a change from the original Latin meaning, but not really a stretch from the Founders’ rallying cry, as they tried to pull together a nation state out of diverse colonial enclaves. Nowadays liberals will stress the pluribus while conservatives stress the unum, with the net result that as a nation we fail at both.
Still, there’s one aspect of the Founders’ gloss on E pluribus unum in which McCain always believed, but with which other conservatives have long disagreed: that the unum of America is a universal set of ideas, and not a territorial birthright. The difference between these two ideas about where rights come from traces from a philosophical clash between the conservative icon Edmund Burke on one hand, and the revolutionary icon Jean Jacques Rousseau on the other. Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism grows more relevant by the day, sums up this conflict as “the Rights of Englishmen versus the Rights of Man.” She points out that once you conclude that rights derive, not from your humanity, but from where you were born, it is a short stride to believing that races of humans originating from other places have no rights at all.
These two contradictory strands of belief have fought a silent war inside the word pluribus for over 200 years. Our democracy has thus far survived. Now, though, there are 7.6 billion people on Earth, and fears over mass northward migrations have sharpened this conflict to a dangerous edge. Changing US demographics are bending our politics to the point of inflection into a new world. Leaders are rewarded for gunning our economy past the redline, regardless of long-term consequence. Scrambles for resources, environmental and food crises exacerbated by climate change, and worsening income inequality are all likely to challenge the next generation in ways that will further stress our political institutions.
It is therefore understandable that many Americans want to retreat into the safe harbor of Burke’s “rights of Englishmen” mentality, and to restrict the entitlements of the American idea to those born on our soil. But John McCain, who was, after all, born in Panama and spent his most formative years in Vietnam, believed that America is more idea than place.
Our generation has reached a fateful moment in history, for we can no longer have it both ways. We can choose universal rights, and keep our democracy. Or we can choose lifeboat ethics, and let it go.