Of course the real issue in this case is the social concept of “being American”. And that idea has had and continues to have some very irrational and arbitrary definitions in the eyes of various parts of our culture. People on the coasts see middle America as weird and out of touch with the rest of America, as insignificant. And Middle Americans see coastal folks as weirdos who don’t represent the real America. (I picked non-racial examples to extract the principle; the point is that we all do it.)

Basically everyone thinks that whoever is immediately around them is the “real America”, because that’s what’s real to them, that is their real America. People who are white, not black people. People who eat hot dogs, not people who eat ceviche. People who dress like this, not that. People with this income, or in this “truly important” place. That’s not to say that there is no reality to “being American”, and it can be scary to see what it means to you changing or being challenged, if it’s changing in a direction you personally find threatening. That scary, wherever you’re coming from.

If you think your dearly bought way of life, means for living, historical legacy, and values may be lost, may be overrun and diluted and swept away and taken over by someone else, that’s a cause for concern. There’s a fear that something you value, something you and other before you struggled to create and preserve will be eroded and swept away. Both conservatives and liberals feel this fear. Conservatives might worry more about losing some idealized past, and liberals might worry more about losing some idealized future, but the basis of the fear is quite similar.

Being American is a much more tenuous concept than the concept of identity in many other countries partly because it’s relatively new, and partly because it’s not founded on any specific racial unity and cultural continuity. Both of those facts make it more unstable than other national identities. We based our national identity around abstract ideals instead of obvious physical and historical similarities. We stitched it together fairly recently from a whole bunch of very different groups, and constantly revised it as new groups were added (either from introduction from the outside or from being recognized within our own ranks).

Really, the great risk with trying to shrink the idea of “being American” to something as small as a particular racial definition is that you lose sight of the much bigger, much greater ideological concept of what being American actually is. An idea so big that learning to even apply it fairly and rationally has from the beginning been a difficult, experimental process that has taken a lot of time to figure out and apply.

We’ve been in an almost continual state of discovery, realizing that the principles and rights we articulated apply equally to women and the Irish, and the Italians and the Jews, and the blacks and the Asians, etc. It’s unity in diversity, a recognition of our universal humanity and dignity (that deserves respect) regardless of where you come from. It’s a concept of shared opportunity free from the prejudice of birth. You may have been born a Jew, or an Italian, or Chinese, or Mexican, or black, or a woman, but you should be able to find an opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in America.

This is a place of collective safety for different creeds and religions because we show a mutual respect for one another’s beliefs and preserve our shared freedom to pursue them. That’s the real American dream, what it means to be American. Least of all is it belonging to some very specific, narrow, uniform group. That’s the antithesis of being American. Unfortunately (and fortunately), because it’s an idea, a universal concept, something that transcends us, it’s not something that belongs to any particular person or group. It can’t be a private possession, passed along and carefully guarded from others.

That lack of fundamental connection makes its life tenuous and vulnerable, though, too. We can’t hold it by default. We hold it all collectively, delicately, dearly. We buy it with pain and labor and blood and sweat and tears. Of generations that fought, generations that slaved, generations that worked terribly hard and did without, generations that left everything behind and risked their lives to reach it. All of it part of a story that led to us having a chance to participate in this strange historical experiment. The chance to be American.

Provocative political postscript (skip if you don’t want to hear me get into any particulars or specific criticisms or opinions):

(Note, this was all originallywritten in response to some comments Trump made about various female politicians, congresswomen, not being real Americans.)

The great shame of Trump’s comments and what they represent is that they represent a rejection of the idea of what America really is (in its best, truest heart, beyond what actual people have struggled to embody). It’s a betrayal of the American promise, and it’s coming from the mouthpiece of someone whose primary job is to preserve and defend that ideal. His rejection of the dignity and shared American identity of people who don’t agree with him, through insults, dismissive talk, and vilification (painting as enemies), is perhaps his worst betrayal of his office. And so it arouses extreme and justified outrage.

America is worth defending. And this isn’t defending America. It’s betraying it by trying to make it the private possession of your political, social, or racial group. America doesn’t belong to the rich, or the white, or the Trumpist conservative. You don’t have to be that in order to have a stake in its future or a voice in its government, any more than you need to be British noble (that is, after all, why we did this whole America thing). Trump sees these people as hating America because he literally sees and defines America as himself, as the private possession of him and people like him. And he doesn’t want to share it with anyone else.

I’m not a Trumpist conservative, I’m probably somewhere between a Bush Era compassionate conservative and a moderate Democrat. Both groups are kind of extinct now; there doesn’t seem to be room left on either side for those people. So I too may eventually find myself left out, denied a space as a real American (according to some group’s definition) because I’m not a real Democrat or real Republican.

The women Trump attacked were 100% attacked unfairly. Ironically, though, they themselves have shown some of the same tendencies as Trump himself, judging and excluding and attacking people in their own party for not being liberal enough and so not real Democrats, seeking to deligitimize their own brothers and sisters. And for sure they’ve gone too far in attacking and deligitimizing people on the other end of the political spectrum. They’re essentially the liberal answer to Trump, driven by social media popularity, which is often most responsive to and conducive to provocative extremes and cathartic simplifications rather than complex, balanced, or nuanced positions.

Both Trump and these women represent legitimate concerns that deserve to be expressed and to be understood. But they don’t succeed at doing so when they tend toward attacks on and exclusion of others. I only bring it up because we have to be fair. It’s wrong when Trump does it to people who don’t toe his line in his party or to people in another party, and it’s wrong when AOC does it to people in her party or another party.

What everyone really needs to do is recognize that we’re all part of America, and we all have our beliefs and positions, and we all have to share the country, regardless. And that means our politicians have to work together. That’s not compromising your beliefs, that a simple recognition of what America is and how our political process works. The system is set up so no single group can easily wield unchecked power at every level. We’ve got all this spread out, diverse representation, laws and limits and rights, and separation of powers for the express purpose of preventing and checking this kind of personal consolidation that would threaten the legitimacy of the many subgroups that make up America.

Back in the old days, when ideological and cultural clustering was defined more by statehood, it meant protecting smaller states from the dominating influence of bigger states. Later it meant protecting smaller political states like the green party or tea party or independents or libertarians from unfair deligitimization and exclusion by the two primary parties.

Now it means protecting half the country (and maybe more since major parties aren’t really uniform) from deligitimization by whatever party is in control. The temptation, seeing one side punching hard and trying to exclude and deligitimize the other, is to punch back and commit the same sin, deny them their place at the table even harder. And so both sides become more and more entrenched and militarized, more drawn into open conflict, when the system was designed for compromise and collaboration.

People may be tired of politics, but this what real politics is. Compromise and collaboration. Getting some of what you want, but not all of it, because you have to make room for other interests. Getting the bird’s eye view of the country that the House and Senate represent (all of America’s differences condensed down to a representation that fits in a single room, all representing and pulling for the particular interests of their group that the others may not have and may not ever meet, but still exist).

A good politician will see all those different people and different interests and realize that this, in a nutshell, is what America is, and seek to understand and compromise and figure out what can be agreed on, what can be done collectively, while respecting and giving legitimacy to the concerns of everyone (even those in disagreement with whatever the collective decision is).

Anyway, I’ve gotten way off topic, but people seem to have forgotten what being American is, as well as what our political system is and how it’s meant to work. And why, when you try to subvert that process, it doesn’t work right. When we lose mutual respect and deny legitimacy to others, especially members of congress, who don’t just represent themselves but are avatars of a whole chunk of America, we harm America as a whole.

Sometimes a bit of politeness and decorum, which we as a culture have largely discarded as irrelevant or a handicap to getting what you want (nice guys finish last), may be the one thing keeping us all together and civil in the room. Trump has radically eroded the rules of public discourse, the rules of what you can and cannot say. Politeness was one of the first casualties of his presidency, and perhaps one of the worst and most dearly missed. It’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle, especially when he breaks the bottle with every tweet.

Politeness is the leash we put on ourselves as a way of recognizing the existence of others who might be harmed by our own unrestrained actions and expressions of belief and feeling and interest. Manners can be bad when they go too far and stifle legitimate and helpful things that need to be said. But we need them, too, if we don’t want our entire country to descend to the level of bad mannered children in the schoolyard. A bunch of bad mannered middle schoolers wouldn’t be able to run a country very well.

And that’s about what we’ve got right now. And unfortunately the tenor of the discussion is set from the top. What we have at the top right now is the least mannered person of all, and it’s just making more room everywhere, in every corner, for more people like him. Trump doesn’t just create opportunities for more people like him in his own party, he creates opportunities for people more like him to rise up as a response to him.

And if you can’t stand up to and teach lessons to and demand better behavior from that top person, you’ll never be able to shut it down anywhere, at any level. Unfortunately for Republicans, if you don’t like AOC, you won’t have any platform for criticizing or restraining her until you stand up to the elephant in your own room (wow, that works on so many levels; mainly two).

Trump is the apotheosis of our worst instincts in our culture to discard decorum and politeness and grab what we want for ourselves and deny the ligitimacy of others. Being president by its nature legitimizes whatever behavior the president engages in. Until it’s dealt with at the highest level, it will continue to erode our discourse and divide us.

It turns out, there are some things we really don’t have room for in our political discourse, because they run counter to the intended design of the whole mechanism. Or at least, don’t have room for in the presidency. And a lack of belief in the legitimacy of other Americans based on their race or disagreement with yourself, a lack of the decorum and politeness that at least in token admits the duty of the president to represent all Americans before the world, and a desire to strictly define American identity by exclusive loyalty to or identity in a particular social group is something we don’t have room for in that position.

Worst of all, Trump seems to want to define this legitimacy by loyalty, not only to a particular group, but to a particular individual, himself. Only those loyal to him are worthy of being in the government, only those loyal to him are worthy of being Republicans, and only Republicans are worthy of being Americans. At least in the past conservatism used to be an ideal bigger than one particular person. Now it’s tiny. Now it’s just a matter of following a single person and being loyal to them or not. Republicanism isn’t America (how could it be, it didn’t even exist and has changed drastically even over just the last ten years).

Trump for sure isn’t America. I don’t want a government defined solely by loyalty to one person. That invalidates the whole point of the American revolution, to get out from under the thumb of a single, particular, powerful individual getting to define what a country is and what it does. America doesn’t need a king. Like the Israelites of old, we may be yearning for a king, because it’s easier, because then it’s not about a big, complex world or compromise or figuring things out the hard way. It boils all that complexity and balancing and respecting the wants and needs and beliefs of millions of others down to just one thing: loyalty or disloyalty to the king.

Trump wants to make the idea of America small and easy for us. But America isn’t small or easy. It’s big and great and complex. It’s not defined by one person or even one party. If the idea of America is going to survive, we can’t have a president who thinks like a king. So Trump either needs to leave or be forced to recognize and pay proper respect to all the limits that everyone has been trying (and largely failing) to impress on him.

There was hope among conservatives that once Trump got into the office he would act more “presidential”. But the reality has been quite the opposite. The failure of those around him to push back or criticize or question (which they did more earlier but gave largely given up on) showed him how toothless those limits were. When you criticize Trump for not being presidential, you’re not harming the presidency, which is bigger than one person, you’re defending it. Nothing harms authority more than the abuse of it. And nothing honors it more than protecting it from abuse.