America is at once that rare thing, a complex cliché, and something all too familiar, a set of contradictions: “one nation under God, indivisible”, but with a dozen varieties of Christianity, the product of Puritanism and the Enlightenment, a colony-turned-superpower equally defined by acts of violence and belief in freedom, isolationism and interventionism, conformity and self-reliance. And yet most of us have no trouble understanding the idea of an essential, even stable America, and possess what the critic Greil Marcus has called “a sense of what it is to be an American; what it means, what it’s worth, what the stake of life in America might be”. The interplay between America’s heterogeneity and its aspiration to coherence is captured in the wording of the Declaration of Independence (“one people”), in the system of government (a federal republic), even in its adopted name (United States). But if we prefer not to think of these as contradictions, if America is a paradox rather than a hypocrite, if it possesses unity despite its divisions, then this is due to a distinctive process, something not quite covered by the terms “polity” or “democracy” or “melting pot”.
more from Leo Robson at The New Statesman here.