the second decade of the 21st century.
Liberals – I trim my cat’s claws by myself instead of having a groomer do it. I like doing it, and she seems to enjoy it as well, often purring as I move across her paws from nail to nail. One time, before I realized I needed glasses, I clipped just a little too close to the nerve. And oh did she yelp, a heart-wrenching screech that made me feel just awful, and rightly so. Ever since then, I wear glasses and take extra care when tending to her paws. But if I were a narcissist, I mean Liberal, who instead of engaging in genuine empathy, mostly just reveled in faux sympathy driven by how everyone else’s experiences would make ME feel, then it would probably have driven me to demand universal healthcare coverage. You know, it just hurts me too much to see other people suffer.
As is, I think universal healthcare really is a good idea, largely because I believe it would be good for the economy in the long run, and it’s also the moral thing to do. It’s not because I can’t bear to watch other people suffer. I can. You know why? Because I’m a grown up. I don’t like to, I’m not sadistic, I don’t get off on it, and if someone’s in trouble, I’ll go over and help them without whimpering or crowing about it. But the fact is, I don’t care if someone decides to kill himself in a 
responsible way or if some dumbass blows his fingers off with fireworks. I’m also not gonna break down in tears if the local news team tells me some kid fell down a well. It’s awful, but I don’t know the kid, I won’t pretend, and I’m not going to personalize that tragedy. Why? Because countless thousands of people around the world die in tragic circumstances every day, and I think getting emotional about the one complete stranger you hear about instead of the thousands you don’t is actually quite self-indulgent. In fact, I don’t even watch the local news. Oh, and I’m not giving Sally Struthers any of my goddamn money either. I’d rather give it to P.T Barnum.
Conservatives – Tim Kreider is probably the best cartoonist you’ve never heard of. A sure sign of this is that he’s the only person to have not one, but two cartoons magneted to my fridge. The creation debate between science and Norse mythology is brilliant. But the one I’m thinking of right now dates back to the outbreak of the second Iraq war and features portraits of two candidates, one Liberal and one Conservative. The Liberal is a nervous, smiling white woman prattling at length about the war. The Conservative is a smirking, heavy-set white guy in a suit whose 
platform is quite simple:
-More money for us.
-Fuck you.
And these are your Conservatives: smug, self-absorbed, self-satisfied assholes completely incapable of sympathizing with anyone. Indeed, they are the exact inverse of Liberals. Both of course are far too narcissistic to actually walk a mile in anyone’s shoes. The difference is that Liberals externalize and soft-peddle their bullshit while Conservatives internalize and brag about it. The result is that Liberals pretend to care about you, while Conservatives pretend to care about America.
Libertarians – I remember the first time I saw the mighty Thomas Sowell speak. It was on C-SPAN nearly fifteen years ago. After mumbling shyly into the microphone, he pushed his glasses up his nose with his forefinger, told a not very funny joke, and then loudly snorted and guffawed like a Trekkie watching a Monty Python film in his mother’s basement. And that’s when it hit me. Just about every Libertarian I’ve ever met fits a mold. Overwhelmingly male, white (apologies to Sowell), and middle class or higher, they are generally smart but socially awkward people who as teens were doomed to not lose their virginity until it was way too late, and they made up for it by showing off in class and always having the right answers, thereby watering the seeds of their mild megalomania.
As adults, they continued to read voraciously, and not just science fiction. Through 
their bookishness they accumulated ever more right answers, and they reveled in the mythology of individualism as a means to fantasize about their greatness. I could rule the world if the world would just get out of the way! But of course, who else but megalomaniacal, educated, white men (and maybe some pampered Asian men) with money would ever believe that they’re in firm control their own destinies? (At least when some jock’s not giving them a wedgie.) And who else but men who couldn’t get laid would turn Ayn Rand into an intellectual sex symbol?
Libertarians, that’s who.
Tea Party – More so than any other current political movement, the Tea Party seems to have a real attraction to American history, particularly the Revolution. Their very name gives it away, and the historical actors who show up to their rallies in knickers, white stockings, and buckled shoes are cute, sort of, but it clearly runs much deeper than that. To them, real Americans have a strong connection to some misty, bygone era, the Golden Age of fighting for freedom and doing God’s bidding by founding His nation. They fetishize the Revolutionary leaders, and of course they molest our actual history in the process.
While all of the groups mentioned here want to establish themselves as the “real” Americans, Tea Partiers are not only the most anachronistic of the bunch, but also 
perhaps the most willing to warp reality to make their case. A sure sign of this is that their movement is a clearinghouse for Birthers, people who are willing to ignore every copy of Obama’s birth certificate or the August 13, 1961 Honolulu Advertiser birth announcement that you put in front of them, and insist beyond all reason that the guy was born in Kenya. Fucking Kenya. You know why? Because real Americans are white. And if the president is half-black, then he can’t possibly be a real American. And real Americans love all of the founding fathers. All of them. Including the ones who absolutely despised and detested each other.
I hate it when mommy and daddy fight.
Communists – Remember them? No? Not really? Okay, never mind then.
The United States has always been too wonderfully and impossibly diverse for any single, specific culture to triumph as the official American identity from top to 
bottom. Hell, Benjamin Franklin infamously believed that the German immigrants of the 18th century were a bunch of lazy, mother-beating brutes (literally) who would never fit in, and that because of their presence, “great disorders and inconveniences may one day arise among us.”
As someone named Reinhardt, whose patrilineal family has been here for centuries, Franklin’s concern about Germans seems downright comical. As someone named Akim, I get it.
The bottom line is that so long as there is a U.S.A., there will always be contests between various factions from among its millions of people to determine what it really means to be American. But don’t worry. It’s not always a bad thing. Funnel that through participatory democracy and our vaunted freedom of expression, and 
you have an endless tussle and countless variations manifesting themselves through identity politics.
And perhaps, in some strange way, that’s what it actually means to be American.
And besides, at least we’re not French.
[Insert Thomas Sowell-styled guffaw here].