A historical tension lies at the center of the American nation. On the one hand, the nation’s founding documents express the universalist humanist principles of liberty and equality. On the other, those documents govern a country settled by a specific ethnic group, with a specific history and culture—English Protestants, with British traditions of law and justice and European art and philosophy—that once failed to live up to those principles. Can America’s background be reconciled with the idea of a universalist civilization?
