A Common Country : Solidarity and the Making of American Democracy

As their democracy faces an array of crises Americans confront a recurring question: whether they really constitute a democratic “people” at all.Reactionaries promote a nostalgic ideal of American nationalism, while implying that many of their compatriots don't belong to their imagined nation.In response, many egalitarians are suspicious of appeals to shared civic belonging-seeing them as outmoded, intolerant, and potentially dangerous.In A Common Country, Nathan Pippenger shows that for American democracy to flourish, egalitarians must not reject the ideal of shared American peoplehood but instead put forth their own distinctive claim to its meaning.Pippenger shows that at key periods-from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era, New Deal, and Civil Rights era-democratic reformers realized that the transformative changes they sought would succeed only if the meaning of “We the People” expanded to include everyone in the country.Pippenger's analysis of this tradition shows not only