All honor is due to whoever decided that the opening of Barack Obama’s presidential center in Chicago should come right before Donald Trump’s planned July 4 gala on the National Mall. The two events will serve as perfect touchstones for the bigger argument that our country’s 250th anniversary is prompting—the argument over American national identity.
The forty-fourth president delivered an emotional speech at the Obama Presidential Center’s opening ceremony on Thursday. It offered a blistering indictment of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president, all without mentioning the words “Donald Trump,” while offering his own ambitious rendering of the American story.
Yet in so doing, the speech also sent an implicit message to Democrats: Defeating Trumpism, MAGA, and the right-wing nationalist vision of America that animates them requires something more than small-bore politics and slogans about “affordability.” It requires a bigger and better story, a positive and aspirational vision, a full-throated declaration of what we liberals think the United States is—and should be—instead.
Obama has long been a spokesperson for the idea of creedal nationalism, which holds that American identity is defined by our founding ideals, versus a nationalism rooted in heritage or ethnicity or race. And so, Obama declared that the “story of America at its best” rests on “shared values that make democracy possible.” They include:
a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government … a belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.
Let’s be blunt: It’s a defining fact of this moment that Trump and his movement simply do not accept any of those things. And it’s important that Obama used this moment to say so. Obama also lionized “the peaceful transfer of power” and called for a reaffirmation of “character, honesty, integrity” and “a sense of duty and honor” in public life. Guess who he was talking about?
But creedal nationalism was the main event here. To reinforce the idea, Obama also declared that these values are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which provided the “framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect.” Implicitly targeting Trump, Obama said that when we give up on these ideals:
we open the door to the most ruthless, or the most careless, or the most fearful among us, who see some groups as more equal than others, and see government as nothing more than a way to divvy up the spoils and punish enemies, and keep those who are different in their place. I do not believe that is the story of America that prevails in the end.
Emphasis mine. That’s as close as I’ve seen any leading Democrat come to stating outright that Trump and MAGA fundamentally do not accept the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality. This is where liberals should go in the battle over our 250th anniversary.
Indeed, in delivering these lines, Obama likely had in mind not just Trump but also recent claims from JD Vance. The vice president—a self-imagined MAGA philosopher-king—has declared that “America is not just an idea.” Citing his own ancestors’ burial on a “mountainside in Eastern Kentucky,” Vance suggests that the “source of America’s greatness” is the “ancestral” bond Americans feel with the “homeland.” Vance mocks the “creedal nation” by insisting that its logic leads to an unacceptable conclusion: that all foreigners, everywhere, might instantly have a claim to U.S. citizenship merely by mouthing agreement with our founding ideals.
Few if any prominent Democrats or liberals believe anything like that last bit. The idea, rather, is that immigrants do have a claim to becoming Americans—they are “Americans in waiting”—provided they clear certain civic hurdles, including adherence to the nation’s founding ideals. Their rates of admission, and the conditions that shape their arrival and assimilation, are agreed upon democratically by our elected representatives in Congress and subject to revision over time. But yes, in the liberal vision, the idea that immigrants do have a conditional claim to belonging is fundamental to American identity.
Vance’s big claim, by contrast, is that fealty to our founding ideals cannot be the basis for American national identity. Blood and hereditary attachment to the soil are, to him, essential ingredients.
True, Vance takes care to praise immigrants and is married to a daughter of them. But he has also mocked immigrant Zohran Mamdani for mildly criticizing the United States, insisting Mamdani should be thankful for his admission here and thus self-censor. As Jamelle Bouie notes, put all this together, and Vance’s vision of citizenship involves “tiers of belonging,” in which those with long ancestry—“heritage Americans”—hold a superior position in an imagined national hierarchy.
Or, as Obama put it, that vision sees “some groups as more equal than others.” In this sense, Obama’s speech is a rebuttal to this sort of Vance-MAGA nationalism. Along these lines, Obama also gave a shout-out to the people in Minneapolis, who
braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look out for their neighbors, and sometimes look out for strangers, because they knew that was the right thing to do.
Among the “strangers,” of course, are all the immigrants—undocumented and legal—who were targeted by Trump for forced mass removals.
In this understanding, the “strangers” do not become Americans simply via support for the nation’s ideals. But they may well be on the road to becoming Americans, via a social process. Crucially, the ties Obama describes here are not purely cerebral or only rooted in “an idea,” as Vance puts it. These are moral, ethical, communitarian, and even cultural ties that develop over time. And this process is molded by majorities deciding—again, democratically—how to shape their political life together and who can share in it.
In a recent column, Ross Douthat, a skillful interpreter of Vance, tries to offer a more measured critique of “creedal” nationalism than Vance does. Douthat suggests certain cultural and ethical habits are necessary for it to be sufficiently binding. But liberals don’t disagree with this. Many expressly see a role for all sorts of institutions—religious, civic, community-oriented—in creating the social conditions that enable pluralist democracies grouped around shared ideals to hold together. The new Liberal Currents Reconstruction Papers, for instance, suggest rebuilding such institutions to reinforce democratic cohesion.
Obama’s speech too makes this point. He says the American experiment relies on a sense of the “common good,” of “common humanity,” of social “trust,” and of “mutual respect,” and hails the role of community in helping create such conditions.
Meanwhile, it’s often argued that “the left” has foregone patriotism and positive nationalism—see Michael Kazin, Noah Smith, and Yoni Appelbaum—and that this is a political dead end. My strong hunch is that Obama probably agrees with some version of this. His liberalism is essentially that of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, a canonical call for a positive patriotism that depicts our country as flawed but progressing toward realizing its ideals. Obama declares as much with his paean to each generation making our “union more perfect.”
At bottom, Obama’s liberalism echoes Abraham Lincoln’s “electric cord” speech, delivered in 1858. In it, Lincoln declares that the immigrants of the day have no ties of heritage or blood to the founding generation. But once they reflect on the Declaration’s promise of equality, it allows them to claim such a bond:
That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.
In Lincoln’s speech, dedication to the proposition that all people are created equal is a substitute for ties of heritage and blood. So it is for Obama, and for him here’s the key: It’s no less strong for being so.
These bonds are not merely intellectual: They are deeply, powerfully rooted in “moral sentiment,” in a sense of common humanity and the mutual goodwill that arises from sharing a common political project. Obama’s speech tells us: If you’re looking for a rebuttal to Vance-MAGA nationalism, well, those ideas are a good place to start.
