What It Means to Be an American Today: Democracy “To Come”

Abstract

This essay addresses the question of what it means to be an American today. In the first half, I respond to Samuel P. Huntington’s claim that America’s national identity is fundamentally Anglo-Protestant by rehearsing Jacques Derrida’s argument that the founding of a nation whose self-understanding is based on the idea of a social contract, such as the United States, implies an “originating violence” governed by extralegal considerations. In the second half, I discuss the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” concepts of American identity and show how deconstruction does not force us to choose between them. However, I suggest that the dynamic nature of the melting pot is more consonant with the deconstructionist idea of the American people “to come” presented in the first half.