In America, Irish American Catholics may have children who become Mennonites and marry Buddhist descendants of Japanese immigrants. Examples like this one occur on a wide-scale level in America today; the identities of the population change, and in one sense, what it means to be American changes too. Yet in another sense, what it means to be American does not change, because the identity of a liberal democratic order likes ours depends not upon identity shifts but the political mechanisms that sustain the space for such shifts.

Rather than basing itself upon shared religious creed, ethnicity, or culture, the liberal order primarily bases itself upon a common adherence to a set of constitutional procedures that mediate different religious confessions, ethnic identities, and shared cultures. This mediation allows for the latter three to ebb and flow while the political order remains stable.

Changes in the political order, however, can alter meanings of ‘being American’—or at least, popular understandings of the political order affect its meaning. What Edmund Burke meant in 1775 by the predominating feature of the American colonists being “a love of freedom” is far from what Justice Anthony Kennedy meant two centuries later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) by his infamous ‘mystery clause’ that at the heart of liberty is “the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

These changes illustrate an indeterminate dynamic of the liberal political order, especially in America. When political events turn against one’s narrative, it may not be “liberalism gone awry” or “liberalism taken to its logical conclusion.” The liberal political order has no determinate end for social change except that there will be social change of some kind.

Stephen White makes this observation: “The general modus vivendi of Western liberal democracies, with all their inherent contradictions and flaws,” arises “from [liberalism’s] mutability and indeterminacy.” To borrow from French historian Pierre Manent, the “political physics” of the liberal order lacks internally mandated direction—or if direction exists, one cannot survey the mechanisms. Because liberal democracy’s basis is adherence to a constitutional order, the internal political physics can be directed in many ways that then mediate the national identity.

The way in which the political left and right sometimes discuss the extent of government reach and patriotism can illustrate this interplay between the national identity and changes in American politics. Both often imply that the national identity is dependent upon their vision of what our government exists to do.

Consider a leftist perspective. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig writes in The New Republic, “For those of us who would like to promote a robust welfare state with a variety of strong, universal social insurance programs, the state is only a means to an end.” Her argument implies inherent indeterminacy in the liberal order since the constitutional order, lacking innate direction, is a means directed toward different ends like social insurance programs.

Consider a parallel conservative perspective. Law professor John McGinnis writes in City Journal, “The Founders wanted citizens to be free to pursue their affairs individually and in voluntary association; the powers of the federal state were to be tightly constrained.” Like Bruenig’s, his argument implies inherent indeterminacy in the liberal order: 'Citizens left to voluntarily associate and pursue their own affairs' predicates no mandated direction for liberalism. The national identity does not dictate the size and scope of government. While 'individuals left to themselves' seems a principled and practical constraint upon federal powers, people left to themselves may want, like Bruenig, a robust welfare state.

Further, Bruenig criticizes former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s criticism of President Obama’s patriotism. McGinnis contrasts the “progressive” policies of President Obama and the ACA with the vision instantiated in the American Founding. In both pieces, patriotism and the national identity depend upon a vision of government mechanisms. Both Bruenig and McGinnis battle over the federal state’s size and scope because the state informs the national identity.

Such size and scope are indeterminate in the long term, but the political drive continues despite a prior lack of innate direction. An innate direction may derive from a national identity based upon religious creed, ethnicity, or culture. While Western European nations, for instance, have some variant of a liberal political order, their national identities nevertheless are informed from historical particularities such as an established protestant church.

The American political experience differs from these because the first Americans (aside from Native Americans) often began by rejecting the established religious, cultural, economic, or political order of home. As President Obama said in his speech commemorating the Selma march, the first Americans broke the “old Aristocracies.” In a passage stringing together the Declaration of Independence, Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea, slaves, abolitionists, suffragettes, various immigrants, and persecuted gay Americans, he states that “what it means to love America,” to “believe in America,” and to think her exceptional is to celebrate our common identity constantly changing:

For we were born of change ... We know America is what we make of it ... America is not some fragile thing; we are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit. That’s why someone like John Lewis at the ripe age of 25 could lead a mighty march.

According to this narrative, stringing together all these multitudes does not overextend ‘being American’ but continually reapplies it. The American political experiment mediates these identities by continually re-applying the love and protection of liberty that centers the American constitutional order. The American self-conception maintains some continuity of form with all these multitudes: Our orthodoxy is change usually for the better. We at least know that our identity is to be going somewhere and that we are free to be so going.

It can be argued this penumbra of multitudes so overextends the use of the word 'American' that its meaning retains nothing substantive and constant over such time and space. The freedom of which Burke speaks and the liberty of which Kennedy speaks are too dissimilar. With Burke and Kennedy I would think so.

But a certain inconstancy may be the lowest common denominator. Consider again the political left and right. American progressivism today consists in conserving the welfare and administrative state. On the other hand, American conservatism consists in preserving the ideals of a revolution and reversing our chariot from driving down what I call “the road to soft Caesarism.”

Noting that President Obama namedrops Edmund Burke and that American conservatives like President Reagan and the Tea Partiers quote Thomas Paine, Yuval Levin writes that progressives and conservatives are different versions of liberalism. The cliché that today’s progressive will become tomorrow’s conservative betrays the indecisive nature of a liberal political order, especially in the American context.

The liberal order makes change an axiom, and the crisscross of rhetorical appeal to the patron saint of the opposite aisle reveals that liberalism is a debate about itself, about the nation-state solving the indeterminacy of its own liberal order. In the liberal order, we were born of change and for change: the question is, what kind of change?