There are two continents and a land bridge between them that are generally considered “the Americas,” so it understandably annoys a significant portion of the Western Hemisphere when the people of the USA consider and refer to themselves as “Americans.” Certainly, there’s no justification for the practice except tradition and inertia. Nonetheless, I will continue to use it for the purposes of these posts without attempting to justify it, at least in part because there’s no good adjective based on the official name of the country or its abbreviation USA.
In the previous post, I pointed out different ways the word “American” could be defined, and I’ve suggested a shortcoming with each of them in the paragraph above. After some reflection, I’ve decided that for my purposes, an “American” is indeed someone who buys into “the American ideal.” That is, I shall adopt as my guiding principle the idea that to be an American is in a very significant way a state of mind. That we are a people unified more by a commitment to a certain idealistic way of living than by a common race or “blood.”
This definition means that there may be many people living here who are “Americans” but not citizens, and that there have been generations of “Americans” who had no right to participate in the governmental implementation of their ideal. Nonetheless, the definition suits my idealism and is a very inclusive one. And in its often exclusive behavior, the US has paradoxically reinforced the idea of inclusiveness that is an unusually dominant feature in this country’s ideology compared to its peers’.