The Chiasmus of American Identity

If anything, American identity lies in the contrasts that bring us closer.

Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute

If there’s one thing Americans excel at, it’s celebrating the most convenient parts of being American. Our federal holidays—President’s Day included—often pass in idleness rather than reflection. Not that I’m calling for mandatory recitations of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address (though it would be cool). But while we take these days off, we rarely take stock of what it actually means to live within the American tradition—a tradition characterized by contradiction, by tensions that refuse resolution.

We see this play out even in our rituals. Though we quarrel over our regional sports allegiances—I, for one, pledge my loyalty to the eternally beleaguered Seattle teams—we cast aside these divisions when the Stars and Stripes take the field against rivals abroad. Our nationalism is both deeply fragmented and intensely unifying, paradoxically strengthened by the very divisions it contains.

These dialectical tensions that lead to a synthesized identity are fundamental to America’s cultural character. The contradictions within our founding ideals have produced a nation that is uniquely dynamic but, as Allan Bloom suggests, resistant to any specific definition or prognosis.

Chiasmus, a literary device in which successive, contrasting ideas are mirrored to form a central truth, is an apt metaphor for the American mind. 

Consider Genesis: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” The inversion sharpens the meaning. America, too, is built on such inversions—liberty and order, democracy and aristocracy, individualism and communalism—each tension held in precarious balance. These contradictions stem from a turbulent Enlightenment inheritance that inverted the norms of the world up until that point.

The first and most fundamental of these tensions lies between the universality of the American project and the particularity of the civilization that birthed it. The Founding Fathers, steeped in the traditions of English law and philosophy, constructed a system grounded in these principles while simultaneously declaring them to be universal and self-evident, accessible to all mankind. 

The Constitution radiates English common law yet distances itself from it in sentiment. The result is a nation whose identity is at once bound to a specific historical inheritance and radically open-ended; the Great American Experiment.

In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville observed that while Americans excelled in political innovation and practical affairs, they were prone to neglecting contemplative life. The pursuit of equality and material progress often came at the expense of a sustained literary or philosophical tradition. This flattening of culture, he warned, risked severing Americans from the very traditions that defined their ideals. 

As writer Lee Oser puts it in his novel Old Enemies, “Civilization is long, hard work”—a work that democracy, by its very nature, struggles to sustain. The tension remains: a nation deeply invested in the fruits of high culture yet suspicious of its aristocratic roots—this is the America we know.

The American character is equally defined by the contradiction between rugged individualism and communal belonging. On one hand, the yeoman farmer, the self-made frontiersman, the Emersonian nonconformist—all figures enshrined in the national mythos—stand as testaments to the primacy of individual autonomy. On the other, the Puritan vision of a “City on a Hill” and the civic republicanism of the Founders emphasize communal responsibility, duty, and shared destiny. 

The fact that America has managed to sustain both narratives without reconciling them is, historically speaking, remarkable.

In The Closing of the American Mind (1983), Allan Bloom offered a stark diagnosis of American literary culture:

“The lack of American equivalents to Descartes, Pascal, or, for that matter, Montaigne, Rabelais, Racine, Montesquieu, and Rousseau is not a question of quality, but of whether there are any writers who are necessary to building our spiritual edifice.”

America, Bloom argues, lacks a set of indispensable literary figures—thinkers who define and structure the national consciousness in the way that Shakespeare, Goethe, or Dante do for their respective cultures. The absence of a fixed canon mirrors the broader theme: American identity is formed through tensions and paradigms, not conclusions and, to some extent, tradition.

Yet this absence does not imply an intellectual void. If anything, it suggests a different kind of dynamism. 

Rather than producing a single philosophical tradition, America has generated a multiplicity of voices—Melville’s metaphysical anxieties, Emerson’s boundless individualism, Douglass’s searing moral clarity, Whitman’s democratic expansiveness—all competing, but strictly non definitive.

Nowhere is this synthesis perhaps more evident than in the figure of George Washington, whose birthday we venerate each February. Measured against his contemporaries, he was not an intellectual in the mold of Jefferson or Madison. Yet Washington’s ardent admiration for Joseph Addison’s Cato: A Tragedy speaks volumes. During the bitter winter at Valley Forge, Washington had Addison’s play staged for his troops, recognizing in its themes of republican virtue and stoic resolve as a model for the new nation.

Washington’s embrace of Cato encapsulates the American intellectual paradox: drawing from an eclectic array of sources—classical antiquity, Enlightenment rationalism, Protestant moralism—yet refusing to be bound by any single one. 

The American mind, then, is not defined by a fixed inheritance but by its ability to adapt, absorb, and reconfigure that which it encounters. 

America is a country of unresolved tensions—between universality and particularity, tradition and innovation, democracy and high culture, individualism and communal identity. These tensions have shaped a nation that is intellectually restless, constantly refining its political and cultural inheritance. 

If America lacks a single literary or philosophical tradition, it is because it has never required one. Its identity is found not in fixed certainties, but in the ceaseless interplay of opposing forces. And perhaps that, in itself, is the greatest tradition of all.