Last week’s Independence Day installment of The Glenn Show brought the team together—along with special guest Rajiv Sethi—to talk about American identity, broadly conceived, on the occasion of the nation’s 250th birthday. Who were we, and who are we? What face do we present to the rest of the world? What makes American culture “American”? How do we manage the social challenges facing a coherent nation comprising an uncountable plurality of ethnic, racial, religious, and political groups?
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We don’t arrive at any definitive answers, because there aren’t any. That’s all in the nature of the American experiment, which is and may ever remain unfinished, with only provisional responses available. Change is built into our country. On the nation’s bicentennial, in 1976, it would have been very unusual to hear a naturalized citizen born in India, like Rajiv, providing his perspective on the questions above, because there were so few Indian immigrants in America. Now there are millions of them, and most of us (though not all) tend to regard their presence here as unremarkable, a remarkable fact in itself. Nor is it at all strange to hear Rajiv lauding what he regards as core American values while, where appropriate, criticizing the nation’s deviations from those values, just as any other American would. Nor, for that matter, is it strange that we consider a Russian like Nikita to be an essential member of a team led by an African American with a Ph.D. in the social sciences.
In the course of the episode, Rajiv, Nikita, Mark, Rob, and I have much to praise and much to lament about the current state of the nation, from our profound cultural heritage to our foreign policy to our international reputation as a bunch of (hopefully charming) loudmouths. We range from Frederick Douglass and William Faulkner to Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. Is that a contradiction? Perhaps. But then, to paraphrase one of the nineteenth century’s great Americans, we contain multitudes.
