Essay  The State as Idea

The United States is often understood as a project, an experiment, and an idea all at once. It is precisely the tension between aspiration and reality that gives rise to the contradictions and dynamics that continue to shape the American nation to this day.

No state can be governed without an igniting idea, the German philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner argued in 1959, leveling his critique at the barren power politics of Wilhelminism[1] — a foreign policy doctrine that sought to bind every other state into a web of treaties and obligations, leaving each with little room to maneuver in either direction. That this strategy ultimately failed was demonstrated by the First World War. The web could not hold: the moment a single seam gave way, the entire net came apart. One nation after another plunged into the madness of war.

Indeed, there is one state whose founding, like perhaps no other, owes itself to such an igniting idea: the United States of America. What was set down in the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago — and subsequently in the Constitution of 1787 — was more than a mere spark, however. It was a beacon. And that beacon appears to burn as brightly today as it ever did. It is as though the idea of the United States has lost little of its fascination and radiance, ambivalent as that fascination has always been.

All men are created equal…  

Any attempt to describe what the United States actually is quickly runs into turbulence — particularly if one tries to reconcile the apparent contradictions that define this country. The historically rooted suspicion of a dominant central authority, whose chains the Revolution had been fought to break, gave rise to the concept of a union of semi-autonomous states. Their relative independence, it was hoped, would prevent any tyrant in the capital from consolidating power over the entire nation. From the very beginning, however, this vision was complicated by what is known as the Unitary Executive theory, derived from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which some interpreters have read as granting the president sweeping, essentially unchecked executive power.

The self-evident equality of all human beings — “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” — proclaimed with soaring rhetoric in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, stood in direct contradiction to the perpetuation of slavery and the denial of equal civil rights to Black Americans, a denial that persisted until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the Declaration's claim to universal human equality was contradicted in ways that remain almost incomprehensible today by the genocide committed against the indigenous peoples of the continent.

What is more, given that in many cases it was precisely the desire for religious freedom and tolerance that had driven people to make the crossing to this dreamed-of land of liberty, it comes as a striking irony to observe the ruthlessness with which groups such as the Mormons were persecuted — and equally, the degree of contempt, discrimination, and outright violence, including lynching, that Italian immigrants were subjected to. They were targeted not only for their Catholic faith but were, in the racial logic of the day, categorized as Black.[2]

The Relationship Between Ideal and Reality

Whatever the reasons for this divergence between idea and practice, between rhetoric and reality: the double bookkeeping that characterizes the American self-image — lofty idealism and sentimental, moralizing rhetoric on one side, brutal and profane power realism and deeply immoral practices on the other — cannot be the only reason a specifically American “hybrid Enlightenment”[3] is mired in its own contradictions. In all likelihood, no single, exclusive explanation can be identified. One must assume a combination of causes that, over the 250 years since the nation's founding, have in ever-shifting configurations shaped the relationship between individual elements of the national narrative — liberty, individuality, self-realization, equality, tolerance, family, self-sacrifice, the rule of law, community — and the social, economic, and political realities to which that narrative refers.

Or must we think about it the other way around? Is it possible that the relationship between ideal and reality needs to be understood in a way that grants the narrative priority over reality? On this reading, the narrative does not misleadingly describe some version of reality; rather, reality simply fails to keep pace with the story being told. If — as Washington and Hamilton proclaimed, and as Democrats were still arguing during the 2024 campaign — the American nation is to be understood as a “great experiment,” does this not imply that the experimental arrangements, with their countless permanently shifting variables, will inevitably produce different results each time, and that those results will in turn require recalibration of the experiment itself? That hypothesis, experiment, and outcome exist in a permanent interplay of affirmation and negation, contradiction and confirmation? That whatever the experiment yields will never fully align with the prior assumptions and the many variables on which it was based?

The experiment is designed in such a way that the hypothesis underlying it can never be falsified. The narrative can never be refuted — it can only be continually adjusted and reframed. Its function is not to describe reality but to call reality into being. And perhaps this is precisely why real phenomena so often do, in the end, rise to meet it: the courage of the GIs in liberating Europe and ending the terror of Nazism may be the most powerful example of this.

Contradictions Keep the Nation in Motion   

An adequate formula for what the United States represents is not, then: a state; or: a nation; but rather: an idea as the perpetually self-renewing unity of its unreconciled contradictions. This formulation offers an explanation for many phenomena — among them the endlessly repeated, almost exhausting invocation of stories about family bonds, self-sacrifice, and individual heroism in the face of overwhelming odds, even as capitalism-fueled hedonism, selfishness, greed, and the calculus of profit steadily erode the fabric of social cohesion.

The cast of characters in these stories includes the outlaw, the lone fighter who breaks corrupt laws in order to see justice done. And among the phenomena that this founding idea has called into being are the invention of soft power through film and the visual arts; narratives of avant-gardism, innovation, individual creative power, and disruption; the perpetual oscillation between isolationism and the impossible mission of global police force; and the self-image of America as a universally valid model for humanity's self-improvement — held simultaneously with an insistence on its own exceptionalism.

The contradictions, as old Hegel might have said, function as dialectically related forces that keep the nation in motion. No observation can refute the narrative, because the narrative does not rest on facts but on an idea. That idea draws its energy from the assertion of a fallen world that the individual — answerable, in the Protestant tradition, to conscience alone — strives to transform into a “benevolent empire.”[4] Just as society can be perfected (“a more perfect union”), so too can individuals perfect themselves. The frontier spirit and the settler spirit blend with an evangelical faith in personal self-improvement, fostering what seems like an unlimited confidence in the value of innovation, in one's own capacity (“be all you can be”),[5] and in a world where the assumption that resources are finite appears as nothing more than an absurd constraint on human agency.[6]

The Union Is Never Perfect — Only Ever “More Perfect”

The state as an idea and as the unity of its unreconciled contradictions naturally implies a constant and largely fluid redefinition of who belongs. “We the people” is always something different. At times, the people are defined in exclusionary terms — as the nativists and Know-Nothings would have it; at other times, inclusively, as all those to whom civil rights have been extended. Sometimes the people means men alone; sometimes both sexes; sometimes as many genders as possible. Sometimes “we the people” is shorthand for the dominant power elite; sometimes it is an idealistic embrace of all those who have come to this country in pursuit of their own happiness. Sometimes the people is the plebs rising up against the elite; sometimes it is the middle class, equally contemptuous of excessive wealth and of the plebs' indifference to their own fate and to the welfare of society as a whole.[7]

For this reason, it is never quite accurate to speak of a perversion of the founding idea. The Union is never perfect — only ever “more perfect.” The state as idea never fully realizes itself; it is always only on the way to becoming itself. And that journey includes wrong turns, side roads, and dead ends. A contradiction that temporarily prevails will inevitably be met by a contradiction that contradicts it, generating a new version of the narrative — one that calls forth a reality it then appears to describe only imperfectly. On both sides of any given contradiction, the idea of the “land of the free” endures as a contested vision, but one filled with ever-different meanings.

The distinction between the nation whose founding heralded the dawn of a new light and all other nations re-emerges, through a re-entry, as a distinction between a right and a wrong reading of “We the People,” between a true and a false understanding of the idea's true meaning: the idea whose meaning continues to captivate us 250 years later.