We’re almost there, folks. The presidential election is nearly upon us, and not a second too soon. We are a people on edge because, while the specific issues at play are familiar enough, the election’s underlying narrative is about something more fundamental than immigration policy, tax policy, foreign policy. The central issue is none of those things. Instead, the unarticulated question at the heart of this election isn’t what do we want to do, but who do we want to be?

The U.S. is a strange country, the first nation created around an idea. That idea—self-governance of the people by the people—was a radical one. Could a nation of Calvinists and corporatists somehow figure out how to create a peaceable governance stripped of primogeniture? Could thirteen colonies with disparate customs and cultures forge a union whose legitimacy doesn’t rest at the point of a bayonet?

It's also a strange country because of who inhabits it. For the most part, we American citizens are not descended from centuries of native stock. Most of us cannot trace our American ancestry back more than a few generations. We arrived by ship and plane, sometimes by our own free will and sometimes not. We are the sons and daughters of merchants and ministers, sinners and slaves.

We are a motley people, whose ruling class often emerges from humble beginnings. Kamala Harris didn’t come from much. Neither did JD Vance or Tim Walz. Only a couple generations before Donald Trump’s ascendancy, the first American Trump, Friedrich, arrived on American shores as a German immigrant seeking to escape mandatory military service, a tradition his grandson Donald honored when concocting a phony “bone spurs” excuse to avoid serving in Vietnam.

Finally, we are a strange country because of our unique confederacy of territories. We are states united, more like a conglomeration than a nation. What is true in one........

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