Strains on social cohesion cannot be dismissed as the embrace of multiculturalism has made the task of defining what holds the community together more challenging.

Last month in Washington, one of the United States’ most distinguished historians offered a passionate defence of America’s core faith. Namely, that it is a creedal nation with a nationalism based around neither race nor culture, but an idea.

“To be an American,” said Gordon S Wood, “is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”

Wood is the preeminent historian of the American revolution.

He took issue with what he labelled the latest “blood and soil effort” from current nativist voices in the US. He says they are claiming that “citizens with ancestors who go back several generations have a stronger stake in the country than more recent migrants.”

As Wood argued, “there is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” and there was no sense of ethnic distinctiveness even at the time of the American Revolution in 1776. Much of the course of American history since, he added, has been an attempt to define an idea of America as one people.

He predicts that “America’s lack of a national identity and a common ethnicity may turn out to be an advantage in the 21st century, dominated as it is by mass migrations from the south to the north.”

One cannot help but notice the fears on the right and the left in Australia, that it is only a matter of if, not when, the ideas of Donald Trump or

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