A year and a half ago, I wrote an essay in The Social Breakdown arguing the need for a revived civic national story and the existential consequences for the country not having one. Even more so today, protecting our liberal democratic experiment requires that Americans set aside their partisan or policy differences. But we need a script around which to unite—a story of the common purpose we share.

Since I last wrote here, my colleagues and I have been developing and testing just such a story at Nationhood Lab, the research project I founded at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. After months of historical research, multiple national polls, and dozens of in-depth interviews with representative Americans, we completed and released our findings in March. Encouragingly, we found that Americans share a broad consensus that the purpose of the United States is to seek to achieve the civic ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration – our “mission statement” as a country — argues that there is a natural right granted to all humans by God or nature to survive, to not be tyrannized, to pursue our happiness as we each understand it, and to take part in determining who represents us and in holding those representatives accountable. Further, it asserts we’re in a covenant, as Americans, to protect one another’s rights to these things. To be American, according to this definition of the United States, is to be committed to these beliefs about the nature of the people and the universe.

And these ideals are far more widely held, our research revealed, than I would have ever expected.

In our preliminary national baseline poll – completed almost exactly a year ago – we asked nearly 1,600 Americans if they preferred to define their country by its commitment to civic ideals or by shared ancestry, history, traditions or culture. The results showed that ideals-based definitions of the country were preferred by nearly every demographic category.

Sixty-three percent of respondents aligned with the statement that we are united “not by a shared religion or ancestry or history, but by our shared commitment to a set of American founding ideals: that we all have inherent and equal rights to live, to not be tyrannized, and to pursue happiness as we each understand it.” Only 33% said we are instead united “by shared history, traditions, and values and by our fortitude and character as Americans, a people who value hard work, individual responsibility, and national loyalty.”

In a subsequent poll of more than 2,700 voters, we tested if Americans agree with the argument that we are duty-bound, as Americans, to protect one another’s natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They did, by an incredible 97-2 margin, one of the widest our pollsters had ever seen. (For context, Americans only agree 80-10 that the Earth isn’t flat, with the rest “unsure.”)

We then worked to optimize our messaging and tested alternative language in additional polls and in qualitative interviews with dozens of representative Americans. (You can find more details from the polls and other work at the project website.)

American purpose, identity, and belonging

Our final script – speech if you will – looks like this:

We’re a nation defined not by shared bloodlines, religion, or history, but by a commitment to a set of ideals, the world-changing propositions about inherent rights of humans set forth in our opening statement as a people, the Declaration of Independence. That every one of us has a set of intrinsic rights given to them by the universe or God or, as the Declaration puts it, Nature’s God:

• to survive;
• to live safe in their own person, free from domination;
• to live the life they choose for themselves;
• and to take part in determining who represents us and in holding them accountable.

And that we are, as Americans, in a covenant to defend one another’s natural rights to these things. That’s the American Promise, our mutual pledge to uphold these inalienable rights. And the American Experiment is the effort – despite the despotic track record of human history — to build a nation, a society, a world where that is possible. We’re a people united by our commitment to uphold and defend this experiment, lest it perish from the Earth.

These are the ideals Frederick Douglass fought for in every speech he gave. This is Lincoln at Gettysburg and Martin Luther King Jr. on the Mall. They’re ideals we’ve spent 250 years struggling to achieve, ideals contested from the outset by those who would make our country something far less, just another nation-state built on blood — tribal kinship, inherited rule, inherited slavery or inherited servitude — where rights are things granted by superiors when they are granted at all. Americans fought a Civil War over them at home and a World War for them abroad and advanced them at Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall. They’re ideals each generation must fight for and that we fight for today. We reckon with our shortcomings, take pride in our advances, and pledge ourselves to make our Union more perfect. 

This mini speech isn’t meant for rote repetition, but rather as a source anyone can use to help express our common cause as Americans. It also provides a guide, based on our most sacred of civic texts, with which to measure if our representatives’ policies and actions are consistent with the American Experiment, or would serve to destroy it.

Throughout our research we sought to determine if custom narratives would better resonate in particular segments of the American population based on region, race, gender, education, religion and the like. We found the answer was “no,” with one partial exception. When speaking to uniformly conservative audiences, we found a handful of modifications to this script were more effective (but less effective with most everyone else.) Some of these are essentially aesthetic – “to not be tyrannized” was preferred over “to live safe in their own person, free from domination” – but others were more substantive. Conservatives don’t want to dwell on our domestic struggles against illiberalism – Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall, for instance – but respond to ones fought against external enemies, as at Valley Forge, Yorktown, the trenches of France and the beaches of Normandy. By contrast, more progressive voters require you acknowledge our past betrayals of the Declaration’s values before they’re comfortable explicitly reembracing them.

But these are differences at the margins. What’s clear from our work is that the vast majority of Americans value our democratic ideals. What they need now is leadership, direction, a sense they’re not alone and that the light of American democracy still burns.