On July 4, we should remember that, as Benedict Anderson wrote, a nation like America is an imagined community since citizens do not personally know each other, very unlike a real community like a family or religious congregation, whose members personally know and care for one another.
Yet national ties bind. Americans are sometimes willing to raise taxes to help compatriots they have never met, even to die for them.
I saw this at an early age in how differently my mom and dad viewed America, despite their common ethnicity. Both my parents were children of Sicilian immigrants, then affectionately (or sometimes derisively) called WOPs, short for "without papers," referring to the many Italians who immigrated illegally.
Mom was at heart Sicilian, distrusting people she did not know personally, and disconnected from America outside of Baltimore. When I moved to Minnesota for graduate school, Mom considered the midwestern state as foreign as Siberia. Mom also sought out Italian connections in the oddest ways. On meeting my eventual spouse, based on wishful thinking my mom incorrectly but approvingly insisted, "you know that girl has some WOP in her."
My dad was American. He paid his taxes even when he could have evaded them. As a postal worker he took pride that, unlike in Sicily, in America you don't have to tip the mail carrier to get service. Back then, schools taught American patriotism, so Dad learned to revere George Washington, not Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi. This became relevant in World War II when Dad and his brothers joined the U.S. Army to fight Italy and its Axis allies. One brother died in the Normandy invasion.
The Maranto brothers took pride in their Sicilian heritage, but Americans were their paisans.
A common American identity was no small thing. Deep into the 20th century, "race" denoted different European nationalities like Italian or Irish in government policies, and in economic and social life. In the 1940s, when some of my relations first married non-Italians, I'm told it was a far bigger deal than in the 1980s, when some first married African Americans.
A patriotic American identity and faith in the nation and its institutions often superseded race. In the 1930s when a nearby beach had a sign saying, in the now unprintable ethnic slurs of that era, no Italians, Jews, or Blacks allowed, my Grandfather Maranto considered the owner a fool, not a proper American.
Anyway, Grandfather had already bought his own beachfront property and built his own house there. When corrupt county officials tried to steal that house for alleged nonpayment of taxes, Grandfather produced the receipts and threatened legal action, after which they backed down. That would not have worked back in Sicily, and he knew it.
Similarly, in the workplace merit often superseded ethnicity. At a time when ethnic differences meant far more than today, my father's career as a postal manager was promoted as much by Jewish and Black bosses as by Italians, because he got the mail delivered. Dad's hard work paid off, which was not how it worked in Sicily, nor even in all parts of America.
One sees merit in the engineering-focused public university my son attends, the University of Texas-Dallas. Fewer than a third of UTD students are white; instead, most have recent roots in South Asia, East Asia, or Latin America. These new Americans like America because, through personal experience and family stories, they know about alternatives.
They appreciate America as a place where you don't have to bribe the police or fear terrorists. The roads function, crime is fairly low, the Internet works, and people of all races tend to be reasonably friendly, notwithstanding occasional exceptions like those my grandfather faced.
Like my parents, today's first-generation and second-generation Americans learn to love America through personal experience: They have an old country for comparison.
But compared to my parents, they are less likely to learn to love America from schools or politicians, which instead magnify national ills and divisions.
I sometimes fear that while some of my compatriots on the right have mistakenly given up on immigrants, some of my compatriots on the left have mistakenly given up on America, a sober thought for the 245th anniversary of our imagined community.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and has served in national and local government. These views are his alone.