America's Struggle to Define a Shared National Narrative

In 2019, an independent commission convened distinguished academics, jurists, journalists, and nonprofit leaders to develop a shared American narrative, only to find that even the word 'patriotism' provoked immediate and heated disagreement among participants. Focus groups conducted across the country had similarly struggled to identify unifying national values, with requests to name common bonds typically met with nervous laughter. The author, whose own ancestry spans Greek, Jewish, Cuban, and Puritan immigrant roots, argues that love of country once served as a baseline from which Americans could debate their differences. Historically, a simplified patriotic narrative centered on democratic ideals of equality, rights, and opportunity held sway through the 19th and much of the 20th century, even as the country frequently failed to live up to those ideals in practice. The piece suggests that the collapse of even a minimal shared framework poses a fundamental threat to democratic self-governance, raising questions about whether the country can sustain civic life without some agreed-upon common story.