american identity thesis

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Race and Ethnicity — American Identity

Essays on American Identity

Hook examples for identity essays, anecdotal hook.

Standing at the crossroads of cultures and heritage, I realized that my identity is a mosaic, a tapestry woven from the threads of my diverse experiences. Join me in exploring the intricate journey of self-discovery.

Question Hook

What defines us as individuals? Is it our cultural background, our values, or our personal beliefs? The exploration of identity leads us down a path of introspection and understanding.

Quotation Hook

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." These words from Ralph Waldo Emerson resonate as a testament to the importance of authentic identity.

Cultural Identity Hook

Our cultural roots run deep, shaping our language, traditions, and worldview. Dive into the rich tapestry of cultural identity and how it influences our sense of self.

Identity and Belonging Hook

Human beings have an innate desire to belong. Explore the intricate relationship between identity and the sense of belonging, and how it impacts our social and emotional well-being.

Identity in a Digital Age Hook

In an era of social media and digital personas, our sense of identity takes on new dimensions. Analyze how technology and online interactions shape our self-perception.

Identity and Self-Acceptance Hook

Coming to terms with our true selves can be a challenging journey. Explore the importance of self-acceptance and how it leads to a more authentic and fulfilling life.

Losing Whiteness: Personal Reflections on Race and Identity in America

John winthrop's "city upon a hill": review, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

What Makes Someone an American

The way an american identity is created, characteristics that shaped an american identity, an overview of the evolution of the american identity, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Questioning The Identity: The Meaning of Being an American

What does it mean to be an american citizen, the rising of american identity, what america means to me, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

The American Identity and The Role of The Foreigner in American Nation and Other Nations

An analysis of native american identity as a result of colonialism in sherman alexie's novel the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, a discussion on latin americans developing their american identity, the view of frederick douglass on american identity, what it means to live in america, what it means to be an american today, the impact of class in social identity, representation of the american family in the works of roth and miller, my cultural identity: who i am, understanding the concept of the american dream, freedom as the root of what it means to be an american, what america means to you: education, rights, and equality, tocqueville on the toxicity of american ideals, american dream as an integral part of american ideals, the evolution of native american identity in joy harjo's poetry, establishment of american ideals during american revolution, the great gatsby: what it means to be an american in a negative connotation, italian-american identity in stallone's rocky, exploring america’s identity subjugation in "americanah", representation of toxic american masculinity in slaughterhouse-five by kurt vonnegut.

National identity can be defined as an overarching system of collective characteristics and values in a nation, American identity has been based historically upon: “race, ethnicity, religion, culture and ideology”.

Relevant topics

• Social Justice
• Effects of Social Media
• Media Analysis
• Discourse Community
• Sociological Imagination
• Cultural Appropriation
• Social Media
• Sex, Gender and Sexuality

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Research: What Is American Identity and Why Does It Matter?

Why Does the American Identity Matter?

The most important reason for understanding American identity is related to white racial identification. It may not be prevalent in U.S. political attitudes, but it’s still an issue. A survey from 2012 asked white respondents to indicate if whiteness represented the way they thought of themselves most of the time, as opposed to identifying themselves as Americans . One fifth of the survey’s white respondents said that they preferred the term white to American when identifying themselves.

How to Analyze American Identity

• There’s no such thing as a universal identity, especially for an omni-cultural country such as the USA.
• Everyone has their own understanding of what it means to be American today, as citizens come from different religious, ethnic, ideological, and geographical backgrounds.
• Explaining the concept of American identity calls for an inclusive approach based on solidarity.
• Depending on how you discuss the concept, an academic essay may require arguments on modern-day immigration and immigrant policies. How do they fit within the common understanding of American identity?

Who Are We?

Guest Contributor

The most important good news and events of the day.

Subscribe to our mailing list to receives daily updates direct to your inbox!

Alexandria Gets Another New Mural!

Say hello to the turkish coffee lady, related articles.

La’Baik Mediterranean Restaurant Opens in Del Ray Neighborhood

Volunteers Needed for Jones Point Marsh Cleanup April 21

Get Caffeinated On The Old Town Coffee Crawl

VIDEO and PHOTOS: Alexandria City Students and Leaders Celebrate and Honor Essential Workers

Americanness and the ‘Other’ Americans: An Examination of the American Identity and Political Behavior of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the United States

<jats:p>American identity has become a racialized norm that is primarily applied to those racially identified as White. We examine what it means to be an American from the perspective of racial and ethnic minorities who may not be viewed as prototypical Americans. Because we know comparatively little about what American identity means for those who are not White, it is important to understand this attachment in order to understand how “other” Americans articulate their identity and how their political actions and attitudes are influenced by those sentiments. Using the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we examine attachment to American identity for racial and ethnic minorities (i.e., Blacks, Asians, and Latino/a people) to evaluate levels of political participation and sentiments toward discrimination. Using a novel measure of Americanness (measured here as the extent to which people feel “allegiance” to America and their sense of “belonging” as Americans) we describe the differences between how racial and ethnic groups view their American identity, and how that perception influences electoral and nonelectoral participation. We find not only that there are differences in how various groups attach to American identity, but also that the impact of this identity attachment on electoral and nonelectoral participation is moderated by race and ethnicity. /jats:p

Published as [Greene, S., Gray, G., Carter, N.M., and Block, R. (2020). Americanness and the “Other” Americans. National Review of Black Politics 1, 396–429.]. © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center.

Block Americanness and the Other.pdf

size: 1.43 MB | mime_type: application/pdf | date: 2021-09-09

• V1 published September 09, 2021

Collections

This resource is currently not in any collection.

Work History

Version 1 published.

September 09, 2021 18:41 by Research Informatics and Publishing

February 28, 2022 22:44 by [unknown user]

March 22, 2022 16:18 by [unknown user]

April 04, 2024 10:21 by [unknown user]

Home > Student Work > Honors Theses > 2509

Honors Theses

American identity: the political consequences of defining america throughout the nation’s most formative moments.

Cate Llewellyn , Union College - Schenectady, NY Follow

Date of Award

Document type.

Union College Only

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Political Science

First Advisor

Professor C. Brown

identity, theories of identity, liberalism, civic republicanism, ethnoculturalism, incorporationism, progressivism, Trump

American identity is just as evocative as it is evasive in American culture. It means something distinct to each American yet binds individuals together as a nation. Its potential to be abstract does not diminish its power as a reality of American life. The story of America is important to our survival as a nation, and calling on identity has incredible potential to compel citizens to action. In this thesis, I explore the development of American national identity both as it grew naturally and was intentionally crafted by political and cultural authorities. More broadly I consider how political and cultural authorities called upon identity in each era I explore, and how these articulations informed identity going forward. In the analytical framework as proposed by Abdelal, I consider the content of identity throughout the most formative eras of American history and the degree to which it was contested. I employ an organizing framework of analysis by considering five theories of identity, which each fluctuate in prominence in each era, and which exist in varying degrees of concert and competition. The five theories are as follows: liberalism, civic republicanism, ethnocentrism, incorporationism, and progressivism. The thesis concludes with a consideration of American identity in the 21st century and beyond.

Recommended Citation

Llewellyn, Cate, "American Identity: The Political Consequences of Defining America Throughout the Nation’s Most Formative Moments" (2021). Honors Theses . 2509. https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses/2509

Since February 10, 2022

Advanced Search

• Notify me via email or RSS
• Collections
• Disciplines

Author Corner

• Liberal Arts Research Commons
• Schaffer Library

Home | About | FAQ | My Account | Accessibility Statement

Privacy Copyright

‘American’ is the Eye of the Beholder: American Identity, Racial Sorting, and Affective Polarization among White Americans

• Original Paper
• Published: 04 December 2022
• Volume 46 , pages 501–521, ( 2024 )

Cite this article

• Ryan Dawkins   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3856-9422 1 &
• Abigail Hanson 2  

3354 Accesses

33 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

This article has been updated

White Americans are more affectively polarized today than at any point since at least the 1870s—and the trend shows no sign of abating any time soon. Recent work using the Common In-group Identity Model (CIIM) suggests that appealing to a super-ordinate identity—in this case, American national identity—holds the potential of bridging the social distance between partisans (Levendusky, 2018). However, CIIM assumes that the normative content—i.e. the norms and stereotypes—that people associate with being an American are the same across subordinate groups. Using the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies cross-sectional surveys, as well as the 2016–2020 ANES panel survey, we demonstrate three key findings. First, White Democrats and White Republicans have systematically different ideas about what attributes are essential to being a member of the national community. Second, the association between partisanship and these competing conceptions of American identity among White Americans has gotten stronger during the Trump Era, largely because of Democrats adopting a more racially inclusive conception of American identity. Lastly, appeals to American identity only dampen out-partisan animosity when the demographic composition of the opposing party matches their racialized conception of American identity. When there is a mismatch between people’s racialized conception of American identity and the composition of the opposition party, American identity is associated with higher levels of partisan hostility.

Similar content being viewed by others

Media and Stereotypes

Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment

Ann Krispenz & Alex Bertrams

Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

Mahzarin R. Banaji, Susan T. Fiske & Douglas S. Massey

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

We’ve always defined ourselves as a nation of immigrants—a nation that welcomes those willing to embrace America’s precepts…. [I]t is this constant flow of immigrants that helped to make America what it is. – President Barack Obama (2010) We will defend our Constitution and proudly uphold the Judeo-Christian values of our nation's founding. We will restore patriotic education to our schoools and teach our children to love our country, honor our history, and respect our American flag. – President Donald Trump (2022)

Americans are more affectively polarized today than at any point since at least the 1870s—and this trend shows no sign of abating any time soon. According to a 2016 report from the Pew Research Center, 45% of self-identified Republicans and 41% of self-identified Democrats saw members of the other party as “a threat to the nation’s well-being” (Doherty et al., 2016 ). The growing animosity between the two parties is also bleeding into other areas of people’s lives, including when making employment decisions (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015 ), in people’s consumer choices (McConnell et al., 2018 ), and even in their dating preferences (Huber & Malhotra, 2017 ; Klofstad et al., 2013 ). For example, in a 2019 survey, Pew found that 24% of self-identified Republicans and 43% of self-identified Democrats said they would not date someone from the other party (Brown, 2020 ). Those numbers were even higher when partisans were asked about whether they would date Clinton and Trump voters (47% and 71% of out-partisans said ‘no,’ respectively).

The causes of the growing antipathy between Democrats and Republicans have been covered extensively in the academic literature (Garrett & Bankert, 2018 ; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015 ; Iyengar et al., 2012 ; Levendusky, 2009 ; Levendusky & Malhotra, 2016b ; Mason, 2015 , 2018 ). This interest in the hatred partisans carry for one another has become more salient as the growing divide between the Democratic and Republican parties poses not only a serious obstacle to bipartisan cooperation and successful collective action—a cornerstone of functional democratic government—but is showing signs of eroding faith in this country’s core political and electoral institutions (Bartels, 2020 ; Barwick & Dawkins, 2020 ; Edelson et al., 2017 ; Graham & Svolik, 2020 ).

However, some have recently applied the Common In-group Identity Model (CIIM) to suggest that the same psychological circuitry in the human mind that drives affective polarization can be reprogramed to ameliorate our partisan divisions through appeals to our shared identity as Americans (Levendusky, 2018 ). In this paper, we question the universal applicability of appealing to American identity to bridge the vast social distance among partisans and suggest that the bridging effect of American identity is conditional on the normative content Americans associate with what it means to be ‘American.’ While it is true that Americans share the same national identity, at least in name, we argue that the norms and stereotypes associated with that identity vary greatly.

We also argue that these competing conceptions of American identity have become the subject of the same partisan process that has driven the social sorting of the electorate over the last two decades (Levendusky, 2009 ). The result has been that these competing conceptions of American identity have clustered increasingly along partisan lines. Republicans have come to endorse a more exclusive, nativist conception of American identity and Democrats have increasingly endorsed a more inclusive, multicultural conception that is antithetical to nativism.

As a result, we show that only when the demographic composition of the out-party reflects the stereotypes that a partisan associates with a ‘true American’ do appeals to American identity have any ameliorative effect on partisan antipathy at all. This finding suggests that appeals to American identity, especially appeals that evoke the racialized stereotypes people associate with the American community, could just as easily exacerbate affective polarization if there is a mismatch between a partisan’s racialized conception of American identity and the racial and ethnic composition of the opposing party.

To test our theory, we focus our attention on White Americans and marshal evidence from the 2016 and 2020 American Election National Studies, as well as the 2016–2020 ANES Panel Study, to make four major empirical observations. First, White Republicans systematically endorse a more racially exclusive, nativist conception of American identity than White Democrats. Second, the association between racialized conceptions of American identity and partisanship has gotten stronger during the Trump era. Third, this sorting process has been largely driven by White respondents’ feelings toward Donald Trump, especially among White Democrats who are shifting their views in reaction to their negative feelings toward Trump and his rhetoric. And lastly, we show that the normative content one associates with American identity predicts how much White partisans like the opposition party. More specifically, when the demographic composition of the other party aligns with the stereotypes a person holds about what it means to be an American, partisan antipathy decreases. However, out-group antipathy goes up when there is a mismatch between the perceived proto-typical out-party member and the stereotypes a person associates with American identity.

The rest of this paper is composed of four parts. First, we will outline the origins of affective polarization as a function of the human mind’s tendency to make sense of the social world through the creation of social categories that help define in-groups and out-groups, as well as how appeals to a common in-group identity can bridge these social categories. Next, we will outline our theory for why appeals to American national identity will not necessarily have the unifying effect that the CIIM would predict; instead, the utility of CIIM is merely conditional on how well the opposition party matches a person’s conception of the proto-typical American, a conception that has become part of the same partisan sorting process that other identities have gone through in recent decades. We will then lay out our empirical strategy for testing our theory and discuss our statistical results. Finally, we will discuss some of the implications of our findings.

Affective Polarization and the Common In-group Identity Model

Theories of affective polarization are derived from a social identity approach to partisan identification (Greene, 2004 ; Iyengar et al., 2012 ; Mason, 2015 ). Social identity theory holds that people make sense of the social world—and their place within it—by creating social categories involving in-groups and out-groups through a process known as categorization. A person then develops their sense of self in reference to these social categories. Indeed, Tajfel ( 1978 ) argued that a social identity is an important part of a person’s self-concept that is derived from their membership in the groups to which they identify, along with all the norms, values, and emotional significance associated with group membership. In order to maintain a positive self-concept, moreover, individuals tend to create social comparisons that facilitate positive evaluations of their in-group and negative evaluations of out-groups, so much so that they often develop exaggerated stereotypes that involve more inter-group differences than might actually exist (Brewer, 1991 ).

People have multiple social identities that collectively make up their self-concept—whether those identities are rooted in race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or even occupation. However, the most salient political identity in American politics is partisanship, in large part because it structures all aspects of political conflict. For the vast majority of Americans, “partisanship pulls together conceptually nearly every aspect of electoral politics” (Achen & Bartels, 2017 , p. 268), and it represents the core ingredient in a person’s political identity.

As a result of these routine cognitive processes, partisans tend to evaluate co-partisans positively while applying negative stereotypes to out-party members (Greene, 2004 ; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015 ; Mason, 2015 ; Nicholson, 2012 ). Partisans also use stereotypes of out-partisans to develop exaggerated perceptions about the composition of the out-party and the positions they endorse (Ahler & Sood, 2018 ; Levendusky & Malhotra, 2016a ). As partisanship has increased, moreover, the two parties have even become more socially, racially, and culturally distinct from one another (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015 ; Mason, 2018 ). Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different areas, shop at different stores, adopt different hobbies, and increasingly marry members of their own party—all of which reinforce their partisan identities and differentiate them from the opposing party (Bishop, 2009 ). This reality reinforces the perception that Americans see members of the other party as fundamentally unlike themselves.

Nevertheless, some recent research suggests that one can ameliorate affective polarization by decreasing the salience of partisan divisions (Iyengar et al., 2019 ), either through rallying together in the face of a foreign threat or through appeals to a unifying, super-ordinate identity (Carlin & Love, 2018 ; Iyengar et al., 2019 ; Levendusky, 2018 ). The dominant theory for understanding the cognitive mechanisms through which this process can occur is CIIM. CIIM takes the mind’s natural tendency to create social categories and uses it to recategorize in-group and out-group members by bringing them under the umbrella of a common super-ordinate identity. Indeed, strong super-ordinate identities can reduce intergroup bias by altering group boundaries to include those who were previously perceived to be out-group members, thus producing a positive in-group bias toward members of the original out-group (Brewer, 1996 ; Gaertner et al., 1993 ).

Recent scholarship relies on CIIM as a possible panacea to growing levels of affective polarization between Democrats and Republicans (Klar, 2018 ; Levendusky, 2018 ; Rutchick & Eccleston, 2010 ). However, because partisanship is so central to people’s core political identity, few possible super-ordinate alternatives exist that are strong enough to overcome the partisan divide. Levendusky ( 2018 ) argues that American identity is perhaps the only identity strong enough to force partisans to cognitively re-categorize out-partisans as members of the same super-ordinant group. Through a series of experiments, Levendusky ( 2018 ) finds that when respondents are primed to think about American identity over partisanship, people demonstrate lower levels of affective polarization.

Despite the promise of CIIM, there is reason to believe the recategorization approach has limitations that could impact its ability to unite social groups in all cases. These limitations are a function of some of the underlying assumptions that must hold for CIIM to bridge the social distance between subordinate groups. First, CIIM requires that all sub-groups who self-identify as part of the same super-ordinate group assign the same characteristics and attributes to group membership (Ashmore et al., 2004 ; Klar, 2018 ). If one group does not see the other group reflected in their conception of the super-ordinate group’s norms, stereotypes, and behavior, the super-ordinate identity will fail to unite the two groups. For example, Klar ( 2018 ) shows that gender identity does little to ameliorate partisan distrust between Democratic and Republican women. In fact, she finds a significant ‘back-fire’ effect, largely because Democratic and Republican women have different ideas about what their gender identity means.

Secondly, because the appeal of social identities lies in their ability to boost self-esteem by helping people feel like they are members of an exclusive group, super-ordinate identities that are too inclusive will fail to unite disparate groups because they may not fulfill a member’s self-esteem needs (Brewer, 1991 ). As such, super-ordinate identities must strike a balance between being inclusive enough to encompass members of both groups without losing their status as an exclusive group, an idea termed “optimal distinctiveness” (Brewer, 1996 ). Identities that fail to reach a baseline distinctiveness will fail to remain socially viable.

Finally, the last issue relates to the first two, and it deals with the problem of ingroup projection. The in-group projection model holds that, if specific subgroups of a super-ordinate identity are perceived to not represent the prototypical characteristics of the super-ordinate group, then those subgroups are viewed as atypical. As such, they will ultimately be labeled as deviant and inferior, thus resurrecting the original in-group/out-group dichotomy (Doucerain et al., 2018 ; Steffens et al., 2017 ). This problem is exacerbated if the traditionally ‘proto-typical’ sub-group also endorses a more exclusive conception of the super-ordinate identity, especially if that proto-typical conception reinforces prevailing racial hierarchies (Carter & Pérez, 2016 ). As a result, the more prototypically representative one perceives their own in-group to be, the more hostility they direct toward the deviant out-group (Doucerain et al., 2018 ; Jacobs and Theiss-Morse 2013 ). This is why people with strong American identities also tend to have more exclusive ideas about what it means to be an American (Theiss-Morse, 2009 ).

Affective Polarization and Competing Conceptions of American Identity

Even though American identity may be strong enough to overcome the social distance among partisans in some cases (Levendusky, 2018 ; Transue, 2007 ), there is nevertheless reason to suspect the strength of this super-ordinate identity might not be enough to unite partisans in all cases—i.e., the effect may be conditional. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that American identity does not mean the same thing to every American, and that these differing definitions impact its ability to act as a unifying super-ordinate identity for all Americans.

Although America’s national symbols and civic values are widely accepted by most Americans, other elements of American identity are far more controversial and less widely shared (Citrin et al., 2001 ; Huddy, 2001 ; Theiss-Morse, 2009 ), especially elements tied to the racial and ethnic stereotypes people associate with the proto-typical American. For example, Citrin et al. ( 2001 ) claim that ethnic conceptions of American identity often fall within two broad, largely contradictory categories. The first conception is nativist in its orientation, and it revolves around the image of a proto-typical American as a White, English-speaking Christian who favors the assimilation of immigrant groups into the traditional American way of life. For Citrin et al. ( 2001 ), this nativist conception often manifests itself in reaction to a second, multicultural conception, which values cultural pluralism and allows for the continued existence of minority cultures within American national identity, permitting individuals to hold both their ethnic and national identities simultaneously (Citrin et al., 2001 ; Pérez et al., 2019 ).

Even though nativist conceptions of American identity have historically dominated in American political culture by virtue of the US population being composed primarily of White Americans (Smith, 1993 ; Theiss-Morse, 2009 ), major demographic changes over the last thirty years suggest that this core conception is being systematically challenged, thus creating a sense of profound cultural threat. For example, the US Census Bureau estimates that the United States will be a majority–minority country by 2045. Moreover, while the country is becoming less White, it is also becoming less religious. According to a 2014 Pew study, only 36% of millennials describe themselves as religious compared to 52% and 55% of Gen Xers and baby-boomers, respectively.

These demographic trends suggest that the image of the proto-typical American as a White Christian is vulnerable to challenge as an increasing number of Americans begin to adopt a much more inclusive conception of American identity in response to these demographic shifts, a conception that embraces the country’s immigrant past as a source of American strength. This multicultural vision of American identity views ethnic and racial diversity as a net positive and operates in opposition to nativist conceptions of American identity. Indeed, this multicultural conception of American identity is supported by studies showing that many ethnic minority groups already define American national identity in multicultural terms, often holding their national and ethnic identities as simultaneously important to their personal identity (Citrin et al., 2001 ; Pérez et al., 2019 ).

This contestation between a vision of American identity tied to America’s ethno-cultural roots in Western Europe and a conception marked by multiculturalism coincides with the sorting of the American public into the two major political parties. Perhaps the most noteworthy trend of the last forty years is the growing social, ideological, and geographic polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Americans are increasingly aligning their partisan identities with their ideological, racial, gender, and religious identities (Mason, 2018 ), especially as White voters have left the Democratic party and drifted to the GOP (Tesler, 2012 ; Zingher, 2018 ). Moreover, the White voters who have remained in the Democratic coalition have grown increasingly liberal, leading many to suggest that polarization is largely a phenomenon among White Americans (Olson, 2008 ).

We argue that these two ethno-cultural conceptions of American identity have also been the subject of partisan sorting among White Americans, especially during the Trump era, as President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign placed the rhetoric of White grievance and cultural threat at the center of our politics (Jardina, 2019 ; Smith & King, 2021 ). The prominence of White grievance politics within the GOP, moreover, has made the association between race and American identity increasingly salient. For example, Smith and King ( 2021 ) analyze Trump’s rhetoric and policies and conclude that he “portrays many Americans today as victims of the secular ‘globalist’ policies of corrupt elites who aid opponents of ‘Americanism,’ while disadvantaging those most committed to American values [:] traditionalist Christians, who are predominantly white” (p. 61).

In other words, Trump has reshaped America’s racial politics and made salient a broader conflict over the meaning of American identity in an increasingly diverse society. As a result, he has rebranded the GOP as the party of White grievance politics and purveyors of a nativist conception of American identity. As Republicans follow Trump’s rhetorical cues, however, White Democrats opposed to Trump have rebelled against them, leading them to embrace a multicultural vision of America and American identity. The result is a polarization effect among White partisans. Thus, Trump has heightened the cognitive association people have among partisanship, racial attitudes, and ethno-cultural conceptions of American identity.

Therefore, we hypothesize that White Republicans will be more likely to endorse nativist conceptions of American identity than White Democrats and that the association between partisanship and nativist identity has grown stronger during the Trump era.

Hypothesis 1

White Republicans are more likely to endorse a nativist conception of American identity than White Democrats.

Hypothesis 2

Among White Americans, the association between ethno-cultural conceptions of American identity and partisanship has gotten stronger during the Trump Era.

If it is true that competing conceptions of American identity have sorted along party lines, then that sorting can have profound consequences on the ability of appeals to American identity to overcome affective polarization. If partisans are systematically endorsing competing ideas about the norms and stereotypes associated with membership in the national community, American identity may no longer necessarily serve as a super-ordinate identity that can bridge the partisan divide in all cases. It may be conditional on the normative content White Americans associate with being “American.”

After all, part of the larger sorting process that has occurred over the last couple of decades has also resulted in the reality that “the two parties have vastly different social compositions” (Mason, 2018 , p. 48). While the Republican Party is primarily composed of White, Christian, self-identified conservatives, the Democratic Party is increasingly non-white, non-Christian, and self-identified liberal. For example, according to a recent Pew survey, the composition of the Republican Party is more than 80% White and almost 80% identify as Christian, while 40% of the Democratic party is composed of non-white members and only about 50% of Democrats identify as Christian (Doherty et al., 2020 ).

Furthermore, the stereotypes that partisans associate with the opposing party often reflect—even exaggerate— these demographic trends (Ahler & Sood, 2018 ; Rothschild et al., 2019 ). Indeed, drawing from research in social identity theory, political parties are not viewed simply as coalitions of like-minded policy-demanders (Bawn et al., 2012 ), but also as socio-political brands that include stereotypes about the kind of attributes that proto-typical group members possess (Ahler & Sood, 2018 ; Berelson et al., 1954 ). As the changing demographic landscape has transformed the composition of the two parties, Democrats are becoming increasingly pigeonholed in the minds of Americans as the party associated with liberals, People of Color, and the non-religious, while Republicans are viewed as overwhelmingly White Christians (Ahler & Sood, 2018 ; Rothschild et al., 2019 ). Indeed, this association between race and partisanship has become so strong that some have concluded that the two are virtually inseparable in people’s minds (Westwood and Peterson 2022 ).

In this context, appeals to American identity could just as easily exacerbate affective polarization as it could ameliorate it if there is a mismatch between a White partisan’s racialized conception of who is deemed a ‘true American’ and the demographic composition of the opposition party. In other words, appeals to American identity can just as easily highlight the differences that exist between the two parties and lead people to conclude that the opposition party is marked by deviance rather than similarity.

Even though we suspect that White Republicans will have a more nativist conception of American identity than White Democrats on average, we also suspect that there will nevertheless be variance within the parties in the distribution of nativist versus multicultural conceptions of American identity. White Democrats will sometimes endorse a more nativist view of American identity, while White Republicans can sometimes endorse a less nativist, more multicultural view of American identity.

As a result, we argue that partisan antipathy among White Americans will be moderated by the degree to which their conception of American identity matches the popular perceptions of proto-typical Democratic and Republican group members. When a person’s view of what it means to be an American matches the racial composition—and the associated stereotypes—of the opposing party, then appeals to American identity will lead to lower levels of partisan antipathy. However, when a person’s view of what it means to be an American does not match the racial composition of the opposing party, then that incongruence will lead to more partisan antipathy. This increased antipathy is because the popular image of the proto-typical Democrat or Republican will not match the stereotypes they associate with what it means to be a ‘real’ American, which signals a violation of group norms and expectations. The mismatch signals that the opposing party does not belong in the national community.

Hypothesis 3a

As White Democrats endorse more (less) nativist conceptions of American national identity, their feelings toward Republicans become more positive (negative).

Hypothesis 3b

As White Republicans endorse more (less) nativist conceptions of American national identity, their feelings toward Democrats become more negative (positive).

Data and Methods

In order to test our theory that appealing to American national identity as a way to ameliorate affective polarization between the two parties is conditional on the normative content—i.e., the values, norms and stereotypes—that people associate with American identity, we rely on the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies. Both surveys are cross-sectional studies of US eligible voters. The 2016 study includes over 3600 interviews, while the 2020 includes almost 4800 interviews. The 2020 ANES also includes a recontact of 2016 ANES respondents, which allows for a panel study of over 2600 respondents. Survey weights are employed in all analyses to ensure the representativeness of each sample. Each survey includes not only multiple measures of affective polarization, but they also include a battery of questions asking respondents what it means to be a true American.

Partisan Antipathy

The measure of affective polarization we are using is a measure of out-party antipathy. The ANES asks respondents how much they like/dislike the Democratic and the Republican parties on a scale from 0 to 10. According to these measures, people who strongly dislike the parties are coded as 0, while those who strongly like the parties are coded as 10. To create our measure of out-party antipathy, we used the ratings of how much Democratic partisans and Democratic-leaning Independents liked the Republican Party and how much Republican partisans and Republican-leaning Independents liked the Democratic Party. Pure Independents were dropped in the construction of this measure. We then reverse coded the measure so that higher values reflect higher levels of dislike for the opposition party. On average, partisans really disliked the other party in both 2016 (μ = 7.162, σ = 2.178) and 2020 (μ = 7.951, σ = 2.257).

Nativist American Identity

The conceptualization and measurement of American identity is often fraught due to its close relationship with concepts like patriotism and nationalism. However, as past research has shown, even though these concepts are often associated—even sometimes conflated—they are nevertheless conceptually distinct (Mummendey et al., 2001 ; Huddy & Khatib, 2007 ; Theiss-Morse, 2009 ; Wolak & Dawkins, 2017 ). On the one hand, whereas patriotism is defined as a love of country and its symbols—i.e., as a form of national pride—American identity is rooted in feelings of group membership and attachment (Huddy & Khatib, 2007 ; Theiss-Morse, 2009 ). In other words, national identity is a “subjective or internalized sense of belonging” to the national community (Huddy & Khatib, 2007 , p. 65). On the other hand, national identity is also different from nationalism, which is often conceptualized as a belief that your county is superior to other countries and involves comparing the greatness of one’s country against the deficiencies of other countries (Mummendey et al., 2001 ; de Figueiredo and Elkins 2003 ). Footnote 1

The other challenge in measuring American identity is the fact that it involves multiple components. The first component captures the strength or importance of American identity to a person’s self-concept, while the second component involves the normative content—i.e., the norms and stereotypes—associated with that identity (Huddy, 2001 ; Theiss-Morse, 2009 ). For example, Huddy ( 2001 ) argues that there is a difference between “the subjective meaning of identities” and “graduations in identity strength” (p. 127). In this paper, we are concerned with the former element rather than the latter. We want to capture the subjective meaning that White partisans attach to American identity rather than how strongly they embrace American identity.

As a result, instead of relying on the question in the ANES that asks, “How important is being American to your identity,” which speaks to identity strength, our measure of nativist American identity uses the national identity battery, which is geared towards the attributes people associate with being American. It is an additive index of questions tapping into multiple dimensions of an ethnoculturally exclusive concept of what it means to be an American, especially its ethnic and racial components. The questions included in the measure ask respondents “how important they believe the following attributes are for being truly American:” (1) Being born in the United States, (2) Having an American ancestry, (3) Being able to speak English, and (4) Following America’s customs. The resulting additive index ranges from 0 to 12, with higher values representing higher levels of nativist American identity and lower levels, by assumption, capturing a more inclusive, racially and ethnically diverse conception.

We believe this is a good measure for an ethno-culturally exclusive, nativist American identity given the copious research that has long associated appeals to “Americanism” with whiteness (Dach-Gruschow & Hong, 2006 ; Devos and Banaji 2005; Steffens et al., 2017 ; Jardina, 2019 ). As such, those who endorse the values of nativist American identity are endorsing norms and stereotypes associated with the proto-typical American as a White Christian. Those who do not endorse these attributes as essential to being an American reject the necessity that a person must be a White Christian to be considered truly American. We also like this measure because it clearly taps into a conception of American identity rather than patriotism or nationalism. The focus is not on an abstract love of country, nor does it create comparisons between the superiority of the United States relative to other countries; rather, the focus is on who is considered part of the national community (Theiss-Morse, 2009 ).

The Cronbach’s α for our nativist American identity index in the 2016 and 2020 surveys is .801 and .823, respectively. Unrotated principal component factor analysis of this battery from the 2020 data also lends support to the idea that all the measures in the battery are tapping into the same underlying latent construct. It reveals only one factor with an eigenvalue above the traditional threshold of 1.000. The factor has an eigenvalue of 2.617 and captures all four measures. The lowest oblique-rotated loading in the factor was .762. Factor analysis from the 2016 data demonstrates almost identical properties.

Partisanship

For most of our analysis, we will be using a dichotomous measure of partisanship. All Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents are coded 0, and Republicans and all Republican-leaning Independents are coded 1. Pure independents are dropped from the analysis. The reasoning here is twofold: First, we are interested in White Democrats and White Republicans as a whole, and we want to ensure that our results aren’t just being driven by the most ardent partisans. In this sense, we want to be conservative in the conclusions we draw. Second, there is ample evidence that pure-independents—a relatively small proportion of the electorate—behave differently from partisans and leaners (Keith et al., 1992; Klar et al., 2022). Since our theory is rooted in sorting and polarization among partisans, pure independents are an orthogonal concern and not included.

We also include controls for other potential predictors of affective polarization. For example, we control for gender because past research has shown that men tend to have more hostile out-group attitudes than women (Sidanius & Kurzban, 2013 ). Age is another characteristic we controlled for because others have shown that people tend to become more partisan as they get older (Stoker & Kent Jennings 2008 ). Partisan strength is another control, with 1 representing independent-leaners and 3 reflecting strong partisans. Strong partisan identifiers are also more likely to have stronger negative feelings toward the opposition party than weak identifiers. We also included ideological identification (0 = extremely liberal, 6 = extremely conservative). Some research has also shown that conservatives set stronger group boundaries than liberals (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010 ). The more politically engaged tend to be more polarized than the less politically engaged, which we captured with a measure of political interest.

Partisan Roots of Nativist American Identity

We begin our analysis by looking at partisan differences between how Democrats and Republicans think about American national identity using OLS regression. In both 2016 and 2020, kernel density plots demonstrate clear differences between the two parties. Figure  1 shows these differences visually. While nativist conceptions of American identity are not endorsed exclusively by Republicans—a significant number of Democrats also endorse them as well—Republicans on average do endorse them more than Democrats. Indeed, a bivariate regression analysis (β = 2.021, SE = .147, p < .000) shows that the average level of nativist American identity among Democrats in 2016 was 6.298, while the average level for Republicans was 8.319. This is a little over a two-point difference between rank-and-file partisans of each party, which is a difference of 2/3 standard deviation in the distribution of nativist American identity. This is a moderately large difference overall, and it shows strong support for our first hypothesis: Republicans systematically endorse a more nativist conception of American identity than Democrats.

Distribution of Nativist Identity among Democrats and Republicans. Bottom panels from bivariate OLS regressions from 2016 among White Americans (N = 2293) and 2020 (N = 4112) Cross-Sectional Surveys. DV: Nativist American Identity (0–12). IV: Partisanship: 0 = Democrats, 1 = Republicans. Independent leaners coded as partisans. Pure Independents not included

We see a similar trend in the 2020 data; however, the difference between the two parties is even larger. Even though levels of nativism are lower for both parties on average, a bivariate regression (β = 2.804, SE = .134, p < .000) shows that Democrats were almost 1.4 points lower on the nativism scale than 4 years earlier, coming in at 4.920 on the twelve-point scale. Republicans were also lower, albeit not nearly as much. On average, rank-and-file Republicans come in at 7.724, just over one-half point lower than 4 years earlier. Whereas the difference between the two parties in 2016 was 2.021, the difference in 2020 was 2.80. Moreover, the correlation between a 7-point partisanship measure and nativist American identity in 2016 was \(\rho =.314\) while the correlation between the two in 2020 was \(\rho =.426\) . While not definitive, we read this as evidence in favor of the idea that conceptions of American identity are sorting along party lines, and it appears that Democrats are largely driving the process.

With only two data points, it is unclear whether this increased association between partisanship and nativist American identity between 2016 and 2020 is indicative of a trend that could be driven by polarization or whether it is simply a function of sampling error or some other idiosyncrasy in the two datasets. However, one of the strengths of the 2020 ANES is that, in addition to a fresh cross-section sample of respondents, it also includes 2600 additional respondents drawn from the 2016 survey. These additional interviews provide a panel of respondents who were interviewed in both 2016 and 2020, so that we can look at within-person change during that period.

To test this aspect of our theory, we utilized the 2016–2020 Panel Study and used OLS regression to see how well support for Donald Trump predicts change in respondents’ level of nativism between 2016 and 2020. To do this, we regressed measures of nativism, partisanship, and feelings toward Trump from 2016, to see how well they explained the change in nativism between 2016 and 2020. This strategy allows us to exploit the chief strength of panel data: making stronger claims about causal ordering between feelings toward Trump and changes in nativist identity. We also controlled for respondents’ age, gender, education, and level of racial resentment. Results are displayed in Table 1 .

Interestingly, the panel shows that respondents have in fact shifted over time and the difference between the two cross-sectional samples is capturing something that is occurring in the mass electorate. As Model 1 in Table 1 shows, while both White Democrats and White Republicans in the panel study have declined in their average level of nativism from 2016 to 2020, Democrats have declined at about three-times the rate of Republicans. Whereas nativism among Republicans declined by .327, the decline among Democrats was 1.09. This finding suggests that Democrats are becoming more closely associated with a less nativist, more multicultural conception of American identity and are sorting their views more rapidly than Republicans. In other words, it is Democrats who are largely driving the closer association between partisanship and nativist American identity from 2016 to 2020.

One explanation for this trend is that Democrats are reacting specifically to President Trump’s nativist rhetoric. In fact, our theory suggests that one reason for the sorting of these conceptions of American identity has to do with the role that Donald Trump has played in reshaping the brand of the Republican Party in the minds of the average citizen. To test this aspect of our theory we included a feeling thermometer gauging attitudes toward President Trump. When we add feelings toward Donald Trump into the model, as is the case in Model 2, the effect of partisanship goes down considerably (β = .481, SE = .216, p < .026). Meanwhile, feelings toward Donald Trump in 2016 is a strong predictor of change in nativism (β =  − .009, SE = .004, p < .014). Consistent with our expectations, this finding suggests that whatever partisan differences exist in the change in nativist American identity, those differences are, in part, being driven by feelings toward Trump, who is both the most visible elected official in the country and the leader of the Republican Party. See Fig.  2 (B) for a visualization of this relationship.

How Feelings toward Trump Predicts Change in Nativist American Identity, 2016–2020

For those respondents whose feelings for the 45th President were the most positive, their change in nativist American identity was not statistically different from zero even though the change in nativist sentiment decreased in the panel sample overall. Conversely, for those respondents whose feelings toward President Trump were the most negative in 2016, they experienced about a one-point decline in nativist American identity. In other words, a min-to-max change in feelings toward President Trump results in over a one-third standard deviation decline in our measure of change in nativist American identity.

Nativist American Identity and Affective Polarization

Up to this point, we have shown that competing notions of American identity are sorting along partisan lines, and we’ve shown that the change in respondents’ view of nativist American identity is, at least in part, driven by evaluations of President Trump. Next, we move on to our test of how a nativist conception of American national identity predicts partisan antipathy. Our theory is rooted in the idea that when people’s conception of American identity matches the stereotypes associated with the opposition party, their level of dislike for that party will go down and vice versa. To test this theory, we run OLS regression with our key independent variable an interaction between respondent’s partisan identity and their level of nativist American identity. The results of these models can be found in Table 2 .

Column 1 displays the results from the 2016 survey. As hypothesized, there is a statistically significant interaction between nativist American identity and partisanship for predicting affective polarization (β =  − .392, SE = .040, p < .000). As Democrats endorse a more nativist conception of American identity, they tend to like the Republicans more. When rank-and-file White Democrats hold the least nativist—i.e., an inclusive and multicultural—conception of American identity, their average level of dislike for the Republican Party is 8.744. However, when Democrats endorse the most nativist conception of American identity, their level of dislike drops to 5.680. That is a decline of 3.064 points on a 10-point scale, which is more than a one-standard deviation decline in how much Democrats dislike Republicans. In other words, when Democrats endorse a nativist conception of American identity, they like Republicans more than when they endorse a less nativist conception of American identity.

Conversely, also as predicted, we find the opposite is true for Republican attitudes toward the Democratic party. As Republicans engender more nativist conceptions of American identity, they grow to like the Democratic party less. Indeed, among Republicans who endorse the most inclusive conception of American identity, their average level of dislike for the Democratic Party is 6.160. However, for those who have the most nativist conception, their average level of dislike is 7.822, which is a 1.662 increase on a 10-point scale. Even though among Republicans the overall effect size of nativism on out-party dislike is smaller than the change in out-party antipathy among Democrats, it is still a 3/4 standard deviation increase in out-party dislike, which is a large effect size.

Our key interaction between nativist American identity and partisanship on out-party antipathy in the 2020 ANES cross-sectional study tells a similar story as the 2016 study (β = .412, SE = .028, p < .000). Republicans like the Democratic Party more when they endorse a more inclusive conception of American national identity, but Democrats like the Republican Party more when they endorse more nativist conceptions of American identity. The min–max change in the level of nativist American identity on Democrats’ antipathy toward the Republican party is 2.777, while the min–max change for Republicans’ antipathy for the Democratic party is 2.171. That is an overall min–max change of about 1 1/4 standard deviation for Democrats and a one-standard deviation change for Republicans in their antipathy for one another.

Figure  3 shows this effect visually. These findings are consistent with the idea that affect toward the opposition party is tied to whether the demographic composition of that party fits people’s conception of who constitutes a ‘true American.’ In other words, the ability of American identity to serve as a super-ordinate identity that can bring the two parties together is contingent on the stereotypes White partisans associate with what it means to be part of the national community.

Predicted effect of nativism on out-party animosity by party

Every citizen in the United States can rightly claim themselves a part of the same national community. While some have argued that appeals to our shared identity as Americans can serve as a potential panacea for ameliorating affective polarization, the results from this paper suggest that this solution is not as clear-cut as it may seem, at least not for White Americans. Just like Klar ( 2018 ) finds that Democratic and Republican women think about gender identity differently, this paper extends this work and demonstrates that not all people think about American identity in the same way. The normative content that people associate with the question of who qualifies as truly American is itself subject to the very partisan sorting that has been driving affective polarization for the last couple decades, so White Democrats and White Republicans are increasingly associating different racialized stereotypes with what it means to be an American. As such, one of the vital assumptions of CIIM will not necessarily hold when it comes to appeals to American identity: partisans do not think about this ostensibly super-ordinate identity in the same way.

The findings from this paper demonstrate that not only do White Republicans tend to hold a more nativist conception of American identity than White Democrats, but the association between nativist American identity—that is, a conception of American identity rooted in the United States’ European past—and partisanship has increased during the Trump era, largely due to Democrats, who have adopted a less nativist, more multicultural conception of American identity in reaction to the Trump presidency. This finding bolsters a burgeoning literature that challenges the idea that identities are exogenous to political context and stable over time (Egan 2020 ; Djupe et al., 2018 ). Instead, one’s identity is responsive to political stimuli and can change over even small periods of time—from one election-cycle to the next.

This paper also finds that when it comes to using American identity to assuage affective polarization, appeals may only be associated with a decline in out-group antipathy when the ideas partisans associate with American identity match the composition of the opposition party. If they do not, affective polarization can increase. In other words, the palliative effect of appeals to American identity on the antipathy White partisans show towards each other is conditional on the normative content they associate with being counted as part of the American national community.

It is important to note that the results from this paper are merely correlational. Because we rely entirely on survey data, we cannot make any causal claims with any modicum of certainty, nor can we rule out all potential alternative explanations. Nevertheless, despite its reliance on associational evidence, the implications of this paper are threefold. First, national identity is perhaps the only super-ordinate identity that holds the promise of uniting partisans and closing the social distance between White Democrats and White Republicans during this period of deep polarization. However, if conceptions of national identity itself become the subject of the very sorting process that is driving affective polarization, then it can no longer serve as a unifying identity that binds the entire country together. In fact, frames that highlight the association of American identity to historic norms of whiteness can ultimately divide the country further, especially as the United States transitions into a majority-minority country. Indeed, continued demographic change will likely make the schism between White Democrats and White Republicans wider before things have any hope to improve.

Second, if it is true that racialized conceptions of American identity are sorting along partisan lines and those conceptions are associated with higher levels of partisan animosity, then it ultimately makes the United States’ democratic institutions increasingly vulnerable to erosion. Indeed, as Mettler and Lieberman ( 2020 ) recently argued, the United States currently faces four trends that threaten to undermine its democracy: polarization, executive aggrandizement, economic inequality, and conflict over who qualifies as part of the national community. The findings from this paper suggests that the partisan sorting of racialize conceptions of American national identity potentially exacerbate at least two of these four threats.

Third, this paper provides impressionistic evidence that the process driving the sorting of the electorate is at least partially elite-driven. This implication can be viewed as a potential silver-lining. Just as political elites—whether they be lawmakers, party officials, or opinion leaders—can propel this sorting process, they can also slow it if sincere efforts are to be made to reframe the political discourse around more ethno-culturally inclusive conceptions of American identity, which could potentially marginalize the most nativist elements in the Republican Party in particular. While lawmakers are motivated by electoral incentives which are driven by forces within the mass electorate, they also are instrumental in shaping public opinion as much as they are responding to it.

Data Availability

Replication data for this paper can be found at the Political Behavior dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RO5BLP .

Change history

14 december 2022.

The original article has been corrected to update abstract.

The standard measure of patriotism in the American National Election Study asks respondents, “how good/bad does R feel to see the American flag.” Conversely, the standard measure of nationalism asks respondents how much they agree with the following statement: “The world would be a better place if people from other countries were more like Americans.” Because these measures are meant to capture qualitatively different concepts, we avoid them in our analysis.

Achen, C. H., & Bartels, L. M. (2017). Democracy for realists . Princeton University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Ahler, D. J., & Sood, G. (2018). The parties in our heads: Misperceptions about party composition and their consequences. The Journal of Politics, 80 (3), 964–981.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ashmore, R. D., Deaux, K., & McLaughlin-Volpe, T. (2004). An organizing framework for collective identity: Articulation and significance of multidimensionality. Psychological Bulletin, 130 (1), 80–114.

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Bartels, L. M. (2020). Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, 117 (37), 22752–22759.

Article   CAS   ADS   Google Scholar  

Barwick, C., & Dawkins, R. (2020). Public perceptions of state court impartiality and court legitimacy in an era of partisan politics. State Politics and Policy Quarterly, 20 (1), 54–80.

Bawn, K., Cohen, M., Karol, D., Masket, S., Noel, H., & Zaller, J. (2012). A theory of political parties: Groups, policy demands and nominations in American politics. Perspectives on Politics, 10 (3), 571–597.

Berelson, B. R., Lazarsfeld, P. F., & McPhee, W. N. (1954). Voting: A study of opinion formation in a presidential campaign, Berelson, Lazarsfeld . University of Chicago Press.

Google Scholar  

Bishop, B. (2009). The big sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart . Mariner Books.

Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: On being the same and different at the same time. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17 (5), 475–482.

Brewer, M. B. (1996). When contact is not enough: Social identity and intergroup cooperation. Prejudice, Discrimination and Conflict, 20 (3), 291–303.

Brown, A. (2020). Most Democrats who are looking for a relationship would not consider dating a Trump voter . Pew Research Center.

Carlin, R. E., & Love, G. J. (2018). Political competition, partisanship and interpersonal trust in electoral Democracies. British Journal of Political Science, 48 (1), 115–139.

Carter, N. M., & Pérez, E. O. (2016). Race and nation: How racial hierarchy shapes national attachments. Political Psychology, 37 (4), 497–513.

Citrin, J., Wong, C., & Duff, B. (2001). The meaning of American national identity: Patterns of ethnic conflict and consensus. In Social identity, intergroup conflict, and conflict reduction. Rutgers series on self and social identity (Vol. 3, pp. 71–100). Oxford University Press.

Dach-Gruschow, K., & Hong, Y. (2006). The racial divide in response to the aftermath of Katrina: A boundary condition for common ingroup identity model. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 6 (1), 125–141.

Doherty, C., Kiley, J., & Asheer, N. (2020). In changing U.S. electorate, race and education remain stark dividing lines . Pew Research Center.

Doherty, C., Kiley, J., & Jameson, B. (2016). Partisanship and political animosity in 2016 . Pew Research Center.

Doucerain, M. M., Amiot, C. E., Thomas, E. F., & Louis, W. R. (2018). What it means to be American: Identity inclusiveness/exclusiveness and support for policies about Muslims among U.S.-born Whites. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 18 (1), 224–243.

Djupe, PA., Neiheisel, JR., & Sokhey, AE. (2018). Reconsidering the role of politics in leaving religion: The importance of affiliation. American Journal of Political Science, 62 (1), 161–175. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12308

Edelson, J., Alduncin, A., Krewson, C., Sieja, J. A., & Uscinski, J. E. (2017). The effect of conspiratorial thinking and motivated reasoning on belief in election fraud. Political Research Quarterly, 70 (4), 933–946.

Egan, PJ. (2020). Identity as dependent variable: How Americans shift their identitis to align with their politics. American Journal of Political Science, 64 (3), 699–716.

Article   MathSciNet   Google Scholar  

de Figueiredo, RJP., & Elkins, Z. (2003). Are patriots bigots? An inquiry into the vices of in-group pride. American Journal of Political Science, 47 (1), 171–188 https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5907.00012

Gaertner, S. L., Dovidio, J. F., Anastasio, P. A., Bachman, B. A., & Rust, M. C. (1993). The common ingroup identity model: Recategorization and the reduction of intergroup bias. European Review of Social Psychology, 4 (1), 1–26.

Garrett, K. N., & Bankert, A. (2018). The moral roots of partisan division: How moral conviction heightens affective polarization. British Journal of Political Science, 50 (2), 621–640.

Graham, M. H., & Svolik, M. W. (2020). Democracy in America? Partisanship, polarization, and the robustness of support for democracy in the United States. American Political Science Review, 114 (2), 392–409.

Greene, S. (2004). Social identity theory and party identification. Social Science Quarterly, 85 (1), 136–153.

Haidt, J., & Kesebir, S. (2010). Morality. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 797–832). Wiley.

Huber, G. A., & Malhotra, N. (2017). Political homophily in social relationships: Evidence from online dating behavior. The Journal of Politics, 79 (1), 269–283.

Huddy, L. (2001). From social to political identity: A critical examination of social identity theory. Political Psychology, 22 (1), 127–156.

Huddy, L., & Khatib, N. (2007). American patriotism, national identity, and political involvement. American Journal of Political Science, 51 (1), 63–77.

Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22 (1), 129–146.

Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, not ideology: A social identity perspective on polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76 (3), 405–431.

Iyengar, S., & Westwood, S. J. (2015). Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59 (3), 690–707.

Jardina, A. (2019). White identity politics . Cambridge studies in public opinion and political psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Jacobs, CM., Theiss-Morse, E. (2013). Belonging In a “Christian Nation”: The Explicit and Implicit Associations between Religion and National Group Membership. Politics and Religion, 6 (2), 373–401. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048312000697

Klar, S. (2018). When common identities decrease trust: An experimental study of partisan women. American Journal of Political Science, 62 (3), 610–622.

Klar, S., Krupnikov, Y., Ryan JB. (2022). Who Are Leaners? How True Independents Differ from the Weakest Partisans and Why It Matters. The Forum, 20 (1), 155–167.

Klofstad, C. A., McDermott, R., & Hatemi, P. K. (2013). The dating preferences of Liberals and Conservatives. Political Behavior, 35 (3), 519–538.

Levendusky, M. (2009). The partisan sort: How Liberals became Democrats and Conservatives became Republicans . University of Chicago Press.

Levendusky, M. (2018). Americans, not partisans: Can priming American national identity reduce affective polarization? The Journal of Politics, 80 (1), 59–70.

Levendusky, M., & Malhotra, N. (2016a). (Mis)perceptions of partisan polarization in the American public. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80 (S1), 378–391.

Levendusky, M., & Malhotra, N. (2016b). Does media coverage of partisan polarization affect political attitudes? Political Communication, 33 (2), 283–301.

Mason, L. (2015). ‘I Disrespectfully Agree’: The differential effects of partisan sorting on social and issue polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59 (1), 128–145.

Mason, L. (2018). Losing common ground: Social sorting and polarization. The Forum, 16 (1), 47–66.

McConnell, C., Margalit, Y., Malhotra, N., & Levendusky, M. (2018). The economic consequences of partisanship in a polarized era. American Journal of Political Science, 62 (1), 5–18.

Mettler, S., & Lieberman, R. (2020). Four threats: The recurring crises of American democracy . New York: St. Martin's Press.

Mummendey, A., Klink, A., & Brown, R. (2001). Nationalism and Patriotism: National Identification and out-group projection. British Journal of Social Psychology, 40 , 159–172. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466601164740

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Nicholson, S. P. (2012). Polarizing cues. American Journal of Political Science, 56 (1), 52–66.

Olson, J. (2008). Whiteness and the polarization of American politics. Political Research Quarterly, 61 (4), 704–718.

Pérez, E. O., Deichert, M., & Engelhardt, A. M. (2019). E Pluribus Unum? How ethnic and national identity motivate individual reactions to a political ideal. The Journal of Politics, 81 (4), 1420–1433.

Rothschild, J. E., Howat, A. J., Shafranek, R. M., & Busby, E. C. (2019). Pigeonholing partisans: Stereotypes of party supporters and partisan polarization. Political Behavior, 41 (2), 423–443.

Rutchick, A. M., & Eccleston, C. P. (2010). Ironic effects of invoking common ingroup identity. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 32 (2), 109–117.

Sidanius, J., & Kurzban, R. (2013). Toward an evolutionarily informed political psychology. In L. Huddy, D. O. Sears & J. S. Levy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of political psychology (2nd ed., pp. 205–236). OUP.

Smith, R. M. (1993). Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The multiple traditions in America. The American Political Science Review, 87 (3), 549–566.

Smith, R. M., & King, D. (2021). White protectionism in America. Perspectives on Politics, 19 (2), 460–478.

Steffens, M. C., Reese, G., Ehrke, F., & Jonas, K. J. (2017). When does activating diversity alleviate, when does it increase intergroup bias? An ingroup projection perspective. PLoS ONE, 12 (6), e0178738.

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Stoker, L., & Kent Jennings, M. (2008). Of time and the development of partisan polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 52 (3), 619–635.

Tajfel, H. (1978). The achievement of inter-group differentiation. In H. Tajfel (Ed.), Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 77–100). Academic.

Tesler, M. (2012). The return of old-fashioned racism to White Americans’ partisan preferences in the early Obama era. The Journal of Politics, 75 (1), 110–123.

Theiss-Morse, E. (2009). Who counts as an American? Chicago University Press.

Transue, J. E. (2007). Identity salience, identity acceptance, and racial policy attitudes: American national identity as a uniting force. American Journal of Political Science, 51 (1), 78–91.

Westwood, SJ., & Peterson, E. (2022). The inseparability of race and partisanship in the United States. Political Behavior, 44 (3), 1125–1147 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09648-9

Wolak, J., & Dawkins, R. (2017). The roots of patriotism across political contexts. Political Psychology, 38 (3), 391–408.

Zingher, JN. (2018). Polarization, demographic change, and white flight from the Democratic Party. The Journal of Politics, 80 (3), 860–872.

Download references

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jennifer Wolak, Julie Wronski, Adam Cayton, Carey Stapleton, and Corey Barwick for offering thoughtful and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped make this paper significantly stronger during the review process.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Wellesley College, Wellesley, USA

Ryan Dawkins

Grinnell College, Grinnell, USA

Abigail Hanson

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ryan Dawkins .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Dawkins, R., Hanson, A. ‘American’ is the Eye of the Beholder: American Identity, Racial Sorting, and Affective Polarization among White Americans. Polit Behav 46 , 501–521 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09834-x

Download citation

Accepted : 07 November 2022

Published : 04 December 2022

Issue Date : March 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09834-x

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• American identity
• Affective polarization
• Political identity
• Public opinion
• Race and ethnicity
• Political psychology
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

Skip to Content

Other ways to search:

• Events Calendar
• On “American Identities”

Josh Vandiver, Ball State University

The identity of America is to negate identity. Such is the contention today of the rightwing youth movements which in Europe call themselves “identitarian” and which in America are known as the Alt-Right. In the ceaseless play of modern consumer capitalism, they argue, Americans are free to construct and discard their identities in politics, religion, culture, and society—even most (or all?) aspects of their personal identities—with astonishing ease. America lacks roots. Such rootlessness gives one the freedom to roam, to create one’s identity anew. Some Americans, like Walt Whitman, have celebrated such ceaseless self-creation, the song of the self. But for certain rightwing youth today, youth who desire to be rooted, America is seen as a dangerous force precisely because of its rootlessness.

In approaching the question of “American identities,” I start from the narrow perspective of my own research on contemporary political radicalism and how studying race and gender—especially white masculinity—can help us analyze identitarian youth movements. Identitarian may sound like an odd term. (At the least, its newness is such that, even as I type the word, my word processor flags it as a misspelling or non-word.) In the past, we’ve seen political movements which identify with an economic system like socialism, communism, capitalism, etc. We’ve seen movements which identify with a political system like monarchy, democracy, etc. Today, we find the phenomenon of political actors who identify as identitarian. In Europe, many are part of Generation Identity, a transnational organization which has expanded beyond its origins in France and Germany to Italy, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. (On which, see José Pedro Zúquete’s excellent book,  The Identitarians , published by Notre Dame University Press).

In America, identitarians are better known as the Alt-Right. Mainstream media coverage of identitarians tends to characterize them as attempting, above all, to fix the identity of Europe and North America in racial terms. Thus, identitarians have been characterized as white supremacists, fascists, Nazis, and the like. While identitarians believe identity encompasses much more than race, the media’s focus on race does reveal an important truth about such movements. For identitarians, race is immutable, and one cannot shed one’s race or become another race in the manner of Rachel Dolezal. In this sense, certainly, they are racist movements. They are also sexist in the sense that they believe sexual difference is fixed.

What such youth movements reveal about our broader politics is that a key aspect of political contestation today is identity, the question of whether it is possible to have fixed, rooted identities and, if so, what they are to be. This applies to the question of America’s identity itself. In the past few years, we have seen people take to the streets over the question of the identity of America. On the left, the Black Lives Matter movement raised the question of whether America is white supremacist and racist, while Antifa today raises the question of whether America is fascist. Rightwing groups—like the “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys in the Pacific Northwest or the bodybuilding-focused, white nationalist Rise Above Movement in Southern California (whose members, once pro-Trump, have since 2017 been arrested and prosecuted by Trump’s administration)—contend in the streets for their own versions of American identity.

While such demonstrations and confrontations reveal that the question of the identity of America is a very serious one, indeed a life or death question in certain cases, what makes the identitarians unusual is their very skepticism about American identity. Oddly, they here advance a point on which some of the deepest thinkers on both the right and the left have agreed (I am thinking of Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze, respectively): the identity of America is to negate identity as traditionally conceived. America does not erase identities by forcing everyone into one mold like the twentieth-century hard totalitarianisms described by Hannah Arendt or the nineteenth-century soft despotisms feared by Alexis de Tocqueville. Rather, America provides the grounds for the endless proliferation of identities and, thereby, in that very fluidity, renders identity comparatively meaningless. Indeed, for Heidegger, capitalist America and communist Russia were strangely similar in their destruction of the kinds of rooted identities he believed Europe could sustain: together, America and Russia surrounded Europe in a pincer movement, each advancing, albeit in different ways, the catastrophic project of creating modern rootlessness. As Nietzsche put it, the desert grows.

Agreeing with Heidegger about the fact of America’s rootlessness (and tendency to spread that rootlessness ever wider), the radical French philosopher Gilles Deleuze differs from Heidegger in celebrating that rootlessness. Deleuze relishes Whitman’s pronouncement, “I encompass multitudes,” as the quintessential definition of America itself. America’s endless proliferation and reconfiguration of identities undermines any singular identity (and any aspirations thereto, which always hint at an incipient fascism, Deleuze warns). If Heidegger and Deleuze are right, American identitarians like the Alt-Right face a steep uphill battle. Something in America works powerfully against fixed identities—including of race and ethnicity, sex and gender.

Meanwhile, the American left has problems of its own. Consider the phenomenon of “woke capitalism”: the commercialization of minority political and social movements (under the guise of supporting them) by transnational megacorporations—the hyper-commercialization of LGBTQ Pride parades, for instance. Deleuze, writing in the 1970s, had already predicted the phenomenon: all forms of identity, no matter now marginal or minoritarian, can and will be commercialized. All the better, from the perspective of consumer capitalism, if new identities keep emerging: new consumers and opportunities for consumption will appear with every new identity “found.” Starting a political or social movement? Woke capitalism will sell you a web domain, t-shirts, and posters and welcome you to its ad-riddled social media platforms to promote your cause. And when your identity changes, it will be ready to offer you the same services yet again.

News & Events

• Benson Center 2022-23 CTP Lecture Series: “Western Civilization: From Classics to the Classroom.”
• Engineering Leadership 2021-22 Lecture Series
• Benson Center 2021-22 CTP Lecture Series: "Capitalism and Ethics"
• One American Identity, Two Distinct Meanings
• Beyond Aspirational Identities
• The Perpetual Debate: A Consideration of American Identity
• Alien to Ourselves
• Benson Center 2020-21 Lecture Series: “The Canceled"
• Benson Center Newsletter Archive
• Miss a lecture? Watch it here!