Second, genuine democracy demands solidarity. 4 The underlying idea is that people are more likely to support redistributive schemes when they trust one another, and they are more likely to trust one another when they regard others as like themselves in some meaningful sense. While self-interest alone may motivate people to support social insurance schemes that protect them against unpredictable circumstances, solidarity is understood to be required to support redistribution from the rich to aid the poor, including housing subsidies, income supplements, and long-term unemployment benefits. The institutions of the welfare state serve as redistributive mechanisms that can offset the inequalities of life chances that a capitalist economy creates, and they raise the position of the worst-off members of society to a level where they are able to participate as equal citizens. Why does civic solidarity matter? First, it is integral to the pursuit of distributive justice. In this essay, I explore different ideals of civic solidarity with an eye toward what they imply for newcomers who wish to become American citizens. And while solidarity can be understood as "an experience of willed affiliation," some forms of American solidarity have been less inclusive than others, demanding much more than simply the desire to affiliate. America's history of racial and ethnic exclusions has undercut the universalist stance for being an American has also meant sharing a national culture, one largely defined in racial, ethnic, and religious terms. Of course, the story is not so simple, as Gleason himself went on to note. To take the motto of the Great Seal of the United States, E pluribus unum – "From many, one" – in this context suggests not that manyness should be melted down into one, as in Israel Zangwill's image of the melting pot, but that, as the Great Seal's sheaf of arrows suggests, there should be a coexistence of many-in-one under a unified citizenship based on shared ideals. Thus the universalist ideological character of American nationality meant that it was open to anyone who willed to become an American. All he had to do was to commit himself to the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism. To be or to become an American, a person did not have to be any particular national, linguistic, religious, or ethnic background. Writing about the relationship of ethnicity and American identity, the historian Philip Gleason put it this way: It is often said that being an American means sharing a commitment to a set of values and ideals.
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