How does the American idea unite us?
About this video
A scholar argues that the United States is not a nation in the usual sense, because it has no common ethnicity. Being American means believing in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, such as life, liberty and equality, and the Constitution helps hold this diverse 'grand experiment' together.
You'll be able to
- explain why the speaker says the US is not a nation in the usual sense.
- explain what the speaker thinks holds Americans together.
- describe the role the Declaration and Constitution play in uniting Americans.
Key words
- nation
- Usually, a people linked by birth or shared ethnicity; the word comes from 'nativity', meaning birth.
- ethnicity
- A shared background such as ancestry, culture or language.
- republican government
- Government by elected representatives of the people, not by a monarch.
- grand experiment
- The speaker's phrase for America's attempt to unite people around ideas rather than ancestry.
Transcript
Well, I think that declaration in some senses, and what it means and all of its phrases are what holds us together. United States is not a nation in the usual sense of the term. The term nation refers to birth, nativity, that's where it comes from. We're not a nation, we don't have a common ethnicity. There's no nation like ours, no country in the world like ours, the whole world is here. There's no ethnic base. Even though France claims to be an enlightenment nation that is based on principles and not, Frenchmen really don't accept all those Arabs who've been living there for three or four generations, somehow they're not really French. But Americans, anyone whose lives in the United States for three or four generations is an American. We have no ethnicity. To be an
American is not to be somebody, in other words, but to believe in something. What do we believe in? We believe in those doctrines that came out of the declaration. Life and liberty, equality, those are the things that hold us together. Then the Constitution has, takes on a mystical role of holding us together. It says a grand experiment, there's just nothing like it in the history of the world. As much as these European states are celebrating diversity, they don't have anything like our capacity for diversity. The whole world, they can't really welcome foreigners in the way we can. I think that's the magnificence and the ranger of this experiment in republican government. The United States is just nothing like it
in the history of the world, where the whole world is present here without any ethnic base.
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