Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tour to tout his new children’s book about the Declaration of Independence should have been uneventful. But then Gorsuch decided to talk about what America is.

On Fox News, with the New York Times and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Gorsuch kept staking out his view on what makes America special: America has no religion, no race, no people at all really, but instead a singular majestic idea.

“We’re a creedal nation, right,” Gorsuch told the Times. “I mean, we don’t share a religion, we don’t share a race, we share an idea, OK? And that idea has to be passed down generation to generation through history, as we discussed.”

That idea, Gorsuch says, is the words of the Declaration of Independence: that all men are equal, that they possess God-given rights and they have a right to self-government. These concepts alone, he says, define the American nation.

There’s nothing novel about Gorsuch’s statement. It is classic conservative pablum, syrupy boilerplate of the highest (or lowest) order. Calling America a “creed,” a “proposition” or an “idea” has been a lazy go-to for American conservatives afraid to give their country any further cultural identity.

In 2016, Paul Ryan called America “the only nation founded on an idea, not an identity.” At the 2012 RNC, Marco Rubio called America a nation “united not by a common race or ethnicity, [but] bound together by common values.” Irving Kristol boasted that “being........

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