American Exceptionalism

What Makes Someone American? It's Neither Creed Nor Bloodline—It's a Spirit

After 250 years, Americans are still considering this basic question.

Jack Nicastro | From the July 2026 issue

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In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country's founding people and ideas. Read more here.

Obscured by the din of fireworks, rock 'n' roll, and raucous revelry, a stubborn and crucial question begs to be answered as we celebrate our Sestercentennial: What is an American?

Historian Gordon Wood has championed a creedal conception of nationality: "To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something." In stark opposition, you'll find Vice President J.D. Vance's physical view: "We're a particular place with a particular people."

Both views hold a degree of truth, but both fail to capture the essence of American nationality. They are simultaneously over- and underinclusive; the challenge is charting a course between the two that minimizes both false positives and false negatives.

American libertarians are naturally drawn to the creedal view—and not without reason. The founding documents of the United States tend to align with our political philosophy.

Thomas Jefferson practically plagiarized John Locke's Second Treatise when he wrote the preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The Bill of Rights legally enshrined those natural rights in the Constitution, including a reminder that "the enumeration…of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

As President Abraham Lincoln famously put it in the Gettysburg Address, America was "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." The Founders' insistence on moral and legal equality is a glorious thing. Yet it is not, in itself, either a necessary or a sufficient condition for being an American.

Wood said that being an American is "to believe in something." The core beliefs in the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and the Second Founding—how political philosopher Harry Jaffa refers to the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments, which fulfilled the Declaration's promise by extending the protections of the Bill of Rights to all Americans—all revolve around individual liberty. So on a naive creedal account, an American is he who believes in liberty.

By these lights, the classical liberal statesman Daniel Hannan, an ardent defender of political and economic liberty, is an American. But Hannan is not an American; he's........

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