ABSTRACT
To fix American politics, we need a shared sense of ourselves as a people, and one way to attain that is to acknowledge and embrace our shared past. Critics rightly point out, however, that not all forms of national memory will do. Conservative nostalgia commonly asks distinctive social groups to surrender their unique identities, conflating all human experiences with those of a single, dominant group. Alternatively, progressives emphasize the sublimated pasts of marginalized groups, but such an approach sets a part of the nation against the whole of the nation. If these approaches won’t work, what will? Fostering a commonly imagined past is needed even though each group will necessarily have its own unique relationship to that past. Creating a national sense of self and a way of articulating it must therefore become the imperatives of our age.
