American nationalism is an odd thing. Our shared history is short. Our ethnic backgrounds are diverse. Our political system is decentralized. From the point of view of most other nationalisms, these facts would be somewhat embarrassing. But American nationalism prefers to treat them as points of pride.

Because of those same facts, Americans have had to make “the creation and maintenance of a shared identity” an unusually “intentional and self-conscious project.” For “surely residents of the same places, subject to the same laws, must share some answers to the question of who we are.” “The sanctification of national principles” seems to be “the only way to draw together a people of diverse origins.” So suggests Samuel Goldman in his rich and thoughtful new book, After Nationalism.

Despite these considerations, Goldman ultimately comes out against what he calls our “present nationalist revival” (primarily of the Right, and also of the Left). But among this book’s many virtues is Goldman’s ability to present a genuinely sympathetic case for his opponents’ views. If understanding the appeal of a political movement is a precondition for criticizing it, then Goldman is in a better position to offer such criticism than nearly any of his fellow contributors to that crowded subgenre, the Post-2016 Critique of Nationalism.

The three main chapters of After Nationalism are an essay in historical interpretation. By deftly weaving together a series of well-chosen vignettes, quotations, and observations, Goldman shows how three main themes have recurred throughout the history of American nationalism. One of these themes is the Covenant, the inheritance of “Christian republicanism” originating in the New England Puritans. The second is the Crucible, the melting pot that amalgamates us into something like a new all-American ethnonationality. The third is the Creed, the common political principles that unite us despite our ongoing religious and ethnic differences. Goldman’s historical portrait of these various versions of nationalism is a success: It is informative and fresh without ever trying to be needlessly counterintuitive.

Goldman’s chapter scheme tends to highlight the contrasts between his three varieties of nationalism. But his narrative also shows them overlapping a great deal in practice. Our Crucible or “great Melting-Pot” was originally thought to be the instrument through which God was forming a new type of man with a unique redemptive destiny for all humanity (or what one might call a Covenant). Certain ethnic groups thought to pose a threat to republican government (or to what one might call the Creed) have either had to be more quickly “melted,” like German Americans during World War I, or else been treated as un-meltable, like Japanese Americans during World War II. And creedal themes are hard to disentangle from covenantal themes in the nationalist rhetoric of, e.g., Lincoln or Wilson.

Walter Russell Mead has persuasively argued that the great strength of American foreign policy is its peculiar combination of several conflicting traditions of thought, each of which has its own virtues that can supply the others’ defects. A reader of Goldman’s narrative might be tempted to conclude that his differing traditions of American nationalism function similarly. Because our national identity cannot be quite reduced to Covenant, Crucible, or Creed, a wide range of Americans can love the same nation for different if overlapping reasons, while our leaders can invoke nationalism under different aspects at different times as circumstances demand.

This is not Goldman’s own conclusion, though. He argues instead that, because none of these three types of nationalism is fully defensible today, we should look for an alternative source of unity that simply avoids “the formulation and pursuit [of] coherent purposes” on a national scale. The strong version of covenantal nationalism rested on a particular version of Calvinist faith that few of us share. The strong version of the melting-pot ideal was advanced through anti-Catholic riots, universal conscription, and other forcible assimilative practices that we no longer have the stomach for. The strong version of creedal nationalism has been hard to maintain during our ongoing post-’60s ideological battles over the meaning of the American Creed.

These are points well taken. But nationalism weakened need not mean nationalism abandoned. In fact, Gold­man’s historical portraits remain visibly relevant to contemporary politics and culture. Many of us do still consider America to be one nation under God. During the five decades of highly restricted immigration after World War I, our melting pot did (Goldman concedes) do a fairly effective job of assimilating both old and new immigrants; perhaps in light of this, Goldman still lists “cultural” considerations among the factors to be weighed in sensible immigration policy today. And even Goldman’s preferred new source of national identity will turn out to be creedal.

In order to understand what unites us as Americans, we should look at what historically have been the two great engines of American nationalism: war and education. War is a major theme of Goldman’s narrative since, as he shows in more than a dozen ways, each new war since the 1750s has forced Americans to define and re­define the national identity that we fight to defend. For example, war has famously allowed many once-suspect classes of “new” Americans to become incorporated into our national identity after proving their loyalty on the battlefield.

Of course, at least some American youth (“new” or otherwise) must already be prepared to bear arms for their country by the time war knocks at the door. The number of these youth will depend partly on whether American schools are educating their students for the duties of patriotism. And perhaps more important, we care about healthy patriotic education because we want our children to have the dignity of rational creatures: to give their respect and devotion to what truly de­serves it, and to be free from bondage to lies or propaganda.

This theme of education gets a whole fourth chapter in Goldman’s book, with a focus on the historiographical controversies that since the ’70s have been spreading from our universities to our high schools. These controversies are significant because historians have “a special role in the maintenance of nations.” To know who we are, we need to know who we have been. We acquire this knowledge from historians, who in our economy are almost exclusively academics. Yet starting in the late ’60s (as Goldman quotes John Higham), “nation-building virtually disappeared from the agenda of academic historians.” Deconstructing patriotic narratives became the order of the day. Subsequent postmodernist attempts to reconstruct new patriotic narratives have suffered from the problem that plagued late-Roman civil religion: Civic myths do not work if everyone knows they are myths. Even among today’s patriotic academic liberals (and there are some), few can bring themselves to endorse “the transcendent element that defined the old national history.” They lack previous generations’ “philosophical, even religious conviction” in “the eternal justice that is anterior to the state,” to which patriots from Jefferson to Lincoln to MLK have appealed.

In the minds of many other Americans today, that conviction still does define our national identity. Great historical texts of American nationalism — the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the Pledge of Allegiance, “America the Beautiful” — express this time-honored conviction while richly blending Goldman’s themes of Covenant, Crucible, and Creed. But where today can American youth hear such texts spoken or sung without irony? Only in a minority of our K–12 schools, a tiny minority of our colleges, and a bare handful of our graduate programs. The logical conclusion would seem to be that this remnant of patriotic educational institutions (and yes, I do teach at one of them) eminently deserves the respect and support of anyone concerned about our nation’s future.

Yet in Goldman’s view, if liberal academics are wrong to hope for a patriotic narrative that could avoid endorsing the actual proposition that God has created us equal, conservatives are equally wrong to think that America has always been dedicated to that proposition. “It was really only around the middle of the twentieth century” that the principle of human equality began to be applied to our politics “with anything resembling consistency,” and nothing about our prior history required it to be so applied. Indeed, the chief burden of Goldman’s historical survey is to show that all attempts to construct an American identity purportedly continuous since 1776 “rely on rickety amalgams of words, authorities, and examples that crumble under scrutiny.”

Goldman therefore recommends a chastened form of creedal national unity based, not on any “quasi-religious orthodoxy” at all, but simply on our common respect for certain “rules of coexistence for people who otherwise don’t share much.” To this end he cites, of all people, John Rawls. But many of us would argue that if any view of politics “crumbles under scrutiny,” it is Rawlsian liberalism.

Goldman wishes, reasonably enough, to deflate unrealistic hopes for a revived national unity. But he arguably falls prey to another version of such hopes. He wants all Americans to “learn to agree” on the Rawlsian friendly pluralism that, in his view, represents the honest alternative to older notions of Covenant, Crucible, or Creed. Such an agreement-to-disagree, he suggests, is the best answer to the question of “what America is all about.” Until most Americans learn to be good Rawlsians, however (and there is as yet no sign of their doing so), Goldman’s vision of national unity is as unrealistic as any other such vision.

It seems that Americans simply cannot avoid fighting over our differing understandings of “what America is all about.” Goldman’s historical narrative should help us to appreciate better how, in every generation, Americans have had to share their nation with many others who view that nation rather differently. But do these ongoing differences really prove that Americans today “don’t share much”? Speaking against that conclusion is the fact that Goldman’s three overlapping themes of American nationalism, found across our history, remain familiar and relevant despite all that has weakened them since the ’60s. Their combination still contributes to a coherent and meaningful, if attenuated, sentiment of nationalism among most Americans today.

We are therefore thrown back on whatever hope can be found in our remnant of patriotic educational institutions. After all, even if education should fail, the other great engine of nationalism will not. Those still willing to fight our wars for us will be nationalists of some kind, for better or worse.

The corruption of our educational institutions is already a source of strain on our civil–military relations. If that strain continues to worsen, the past century of world history does not suggest a Rawlsian friendly pluralism as the likely outcome. We should all be doing what we can to ensure that a few educated nationalists will be available to form and guide the next generation of, at least, those Americans who will bear arms for their country. We may even hope that some of these nationalists share, and will continue to share, the time-honored American belief in “the eternal justice that is anterior to the state.”