A Breakdown of the American Idea

Masked federal officers have now killed two U.S. citizens in the streets of Minneapolis. In both cases, the Trump administration stood by the officers, claiming that the Americans they shot to death were interfering with law enforcement, which has never been a capital offense. These events have set a dark precedent. Americans can no longer assume that they can exercise their established rights to protest and observe public law enforcement without punishment, which raises questions about the exercise of other historically attested rights. If we are not as safe from state violence as we thought we were, then the very foundations of the country seem shaky, and we may be witnessing a breakdown of the American idea.

The United States was founded as an experiment in propositional citizenship, the idea that a nation could be bound not by race, ethnicity, or language but by fidelity to a set of principles—liberty, equality, self-governance, and inalienable rights. In an address in 1858, Abraham Lincoln reminded his audience that although many Americans had been in the country for only a short time, having arrived from Germany, Ireland, France, Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere in Europe, they still found “themselves our equals in all things.” These new citizens might not have been able to trace their roots to the country’s early history, Lincoln said, but they were fully American thanks to their belief in the moral sentiments embedded in “that old Declaration of Independence.” That, Lincoln said, is the “electric cord” that binds “the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together”—a bind that should last “as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”