There's a lot of doomerism going around about undermining shared symbols of American national identity ('cancelling' G. Washington/Lincoln, removing the anthem from public events/arguing for replacement, full end of teaching shared national history, etc), and I share the anger..

..but I wonder about how far things will fall. National identity is v sticky ('imagined communities' and 'fictive kinship' are actually strong and real), and all these shared 'myths' are tangible things that have a 200-400 year pedigree, plus a continent of monuments to them..

..and in any case, nationalism (per Gellner) is about making the nation congruent with polity boundaries. Unless we're going to see the rise of state-level patriotism, I don't see something else to glom onto. Banal multiculturalism and progressivism-as-identity is ephemera..

.., doesn't self-replicate, and can't fill an umbrella identity void. Even Canadian ur-liberal nationalism is full of shared national symbols, it's literally the opposite of breaking down bridging identities and replacing them with particularist, self-hating incoherencies..

..(also Canada does have rival region-level identity loyalties, but that's a different problem). Anyway, I think its going to be hard to find other bridging identities, or subnational identities to fill the need for a polity-level shared identity..

..so the point here is...what happens when elites blow up the national symbols? Probably they just come back, tbh. Because they'll always be available, they actually happened, they have history to back them up, and we live among them. Cancel Lincoln and then a new gen comes..

..around and says, 'well that was super dumb, look at this hero guy,' and then rediscovers a century and a half worth of literature, media, scholarly work, and national propaganda that idolizes Lincoln - and you know what, that's gonna be much easier than doing a year zero..

..All the anti-nationalism stuff going on right now can get pretty bad, and could run for a generation or two, esp among elites. But we *did* have a v successful nationalization campaign in the US, and there's just a lot of path dependence and a giant toolkit of options there..

..So while breaking down shared bonds *is* v bad and short-sighted and will do lots of damage, American nationhood is likely here to stay in the med- to long-term. There's finite identity resources to work with, and this stuff is the oldest we have in our new world experiment.