This February, as San Francisco’s rainy season waned to a dour cloudiness, I found myself at a Winter Olympics-themed party. Eileen Gu was everywhere. Her face adorned the living room wall, her reruns blasted on the TV, and her name was the answer for two different trivia questions, including “Who is the most decorated American skier?”
That answer is, obviously, incorrect. Gu is the most decorated freestyle skier, but Mikaela Shiffrin, an alpine skier, wins in the overall count.
Also, Eileen Gu isn’t an American skier.
You could be forgiven for forgetting. Gu was, after all, born and raised in San Francisco. Her mother is a Stanford-educated venture capitalist; her father is a Harvard graduate. Gu grew up in Sea Cliff, one of San Francisco’s most-exclusive neighborhoods, where sprawling pueblo-style mansions overlook the Pacific ocean.
She started skiing at 3, joined Northstar’s ski team at 8, won her first championship at 9, and started international competition in 2018. In 2019, as China unveiled the first facilities for the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics, she made the announcement: Eileen Gu, the American-born American skier, would be representing China in its home games.
Like everything else under the CCP, this was not a spontaneous upsurge of patriotism. The Chinese government launched a program in 2015 to recruit diaspora athletes to boost its showing at the Olympics. Gu wasn’t even the first choice. They approached Alysa Liu first, but her father, a student who fled from tanks at Tiananmen square, refused without consideration.
The details of the deal Gu’s mother hashed out aren’t public, but quite a few things are clear. The government promised massive state media promotion during the Beijing winter games, a network of endorsements with Chinese brands, and fast-tracked her citizenship. They also allowed her to retain her American passport despite China’s official ban on dual citizenship.1
In 2022, she was listed as the second highest-earning female athlete in the world.
This all was quite reasonable to most people at the Winter Olympics party. When Gu’s backstory was mentioned, someone quipped, to a gale of laughter, “She did the most American thing ever—she sold out.”
I laughed too. It was a good line. But I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards. What struck me first was the composition of that room. The party was full of software engineers, data scientists, and researchers, from Berkeley or Stanford or UIUC or MIT. Everyone was intelligent, upwardly-mobile, and recently removed from an international vacation.
This was, in short, the vaunted “coastal elite.” They were the products of our most prestigious institutions, who now dominated our most powerful and vibrant companies. Some were immigrant children, others were many-generation Americans, but they all shared a similar appetite for achievement, status, and wealth.
This is the group that benefits most from modern America. They are the party helped by international outsourcing, elite credentialism, and professional stratification. And yet, inexplicably, they seemed to have little but contempt for the very country that produced them.
Indeed, for them, Gu’s example was rational, even admirable. She’d accumulated capital in America, and then, when a new opportunity presented itself, she deployed that capital for an improved returns. That those returns now required allying herself with the geopolitical enemy of the country of her birth was a logistical detail, not a moral consideration. Indeed, many of them looked at her in envy, imagining themselves doing the same.
Following that frame, Eileen Gu is a visible hallmark of a new conception of American identity. Here, America is a land of rootless opportunity, where one immigrates to extract and accumulate, not to inhabit or even respect. Citizenship is not a mark of allegiance, but rather, a market position, and patriotism is gauche, or worse: morally suspect. One isn’t an American, one is in America, and when China takes the lead in tech, or when Trump does something too fascist, or when the Bay Area becomes too dirty, one will just decamp elsewhere.
None of this sounds particularly subversive. If you’re an educated professional in a liberal city, what I described is the most visible form of national identity you see. And given how ensconced we are in this postmodern cynicism, it’s easy to forget how strange it is.
Imagine, instead, that it’s 1972. An American athlete couldn’t even think about representing the USSR in the Olympics: it would be tantamount to defection. Or more directly, imagine Eileen Gu’s direct inversion, a Chinese athlete wanting to represent the United States. The Chinese government would prevent it, and that athlete would face real repercussions. At the very least, they would never be allowed entrance to China again.
Instead, in modern America, we not only allow such a transparent betrayal, but we celebrate it. Eileen Gu skies for China but her victories are celebrated on American news channels. Even as she deflected comments on Peng Shuai in a press conference or downplayed the Uyghur concentration camps in Time magazine, she continued to exercise the privileges of American citizenship (unless, of course, she diligently applied for a Schengen visa on each of her many trips to Europe). And out of all of the deserving Chinese-Americans in the country, she was chosen as Grand Marshal of SF’s Lunar New Year Parade this year.
What we’re seeing here is the forging of a new social class, the professional-managerial class—American capitalism’s latest invention and world export. It’s a class reared in postmodern detachment, for whom America is not a country to support but an economic zone designed to provide maximum value. For them, citizenship is just one in a list of privileges they’re accumulating, and America is just one option out of 195. Eileen Gu is the latest emblem of that class. Her mother fled China when Maoism didn’t discriminate towards the wealthy; now that China is more amenable, her daughter is open to going back.
This isn’t a matter of taste of envy, nor of mere *ressentiment* against someone else’s success. It’s about the concept of nationhood itself. America is, in a specific and unusual sense, a nation forged from belief, and because of that, it’s uniquely fragile. Lincoln articulated it most clearly at Gettysburg: America is a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Indeed, we are a creedal people, united by our belief in core axioms about what makes a just, strong, and virtuous society. Our country is undergirded by an almost delusional faith in the government of, by and for, the people. It’s defined by an undying, unending optimism that America is an exceptional place with its own destiny, and the things we do here will save the entire world. As John Gast—an immigrant himself!—depicted, Columbia marches across the Earth, shining American light upon the benighted.
This carried us through the darkest of moments: secession, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and then the Soviet menace. It sustained through our deepest contradictions: slavery, Japanese internment and Jim Crow. But now, as we enter a second Cold War, our belief is fracturing. Our foundational myths have been deconstructed and problematized. Our works, both within and abroad, are criticized the most at home, by our own people. And now, even the immigrants who built their fortunes within our country are rejecting any claim we have to exceptionalism. How can that nation long endure? What happens when a credal people surrender their own creed?
A creed is far more than mere belief. Belief alone could never forge a nation. A creed is an identity. It is when intellectual faith in ideology sublimates into a perspective, deeply held, that colors every human judgement.
C.S Lewis spoke of this in The Abolition of Man, his famous lament on the British youth of his day. It was written in 1943, four years into the greatest existential struggle for Britain’s future. The Blitz was over, Stalingrad, with its awful human cost, had just been retaken, and while victory now seemed likely, its final achievement still remained a dream of the misty future. Around him, British intellectual life was awash with discussion on the civilization they would build in the war’s bloody wake.
Into this milieu, Lewis saw new British textbooks that aimed to bring the first embers of moral relativism to the British classroom, and imagined the future it would wrought on his beloved society. He imagined a generation of students, reared with sentiments like “when you call a waterfall “sublime,” you are not describing the waterfall but reporting your own feelings,” and considered what they thought of war. If you teach that moral claims are just expressions of feeling, how would they oppose the Nazi’s, whose own ideology depended entirely on that premise? And how would they justify the next war against evil?
And so, Lewis wrote a dissertation defending moral absolutism. There was a single model of virtue, he said, reaching as far back as Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, that all men ought to exhibit. There is a good, there is a bad, and the space between these poles contains the infinitude of all human behavior.
What’s more, Lewis stated that it wasn’t enough to know such a truth. One must have feeling. It must leap from the chest, Lewis’ abstracted home of emotion, and it must be instinctive. And those feelings, which he calls “just sentiments,” are core to virtue. You need just sentiments to do just things—mere intellectual knowledge will not suffice. He captured that vividly in his closing paragraph:
“And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
This diagnosis is almost embarrassingly applicable to modern America. Our credentialed elite, the fruit of our generational labor, has been reared in a framework where principled detachment is the core virtue. Is it a surprise, then, that our nation’s creed withers?
In his polemic, Lewis also builds on the western concept of citizenship. To be a citizen is to be a full member of a polity. You’re entitled to its protection, to its adjudication of justice, to have a say in its governance, and in return, you’re expected to serve it during its time of need. This dual concept of citizenship, where privileges are granted in return for duties, was originally a Roman innovation. It was the original model for an open society, where new men that were willing to accept the obligations of citizenship could also benefit from its privileges.
Those obligations were severe. Every male of military age was subject to conscription, and as the Republic was at war almost every year from 509 BCE to 27 BCE, they definitely would serve. Citizens paid additional taxes on land and on inheritance. Citizens had to present for censuses for tax reassessment and serve on juries when summoned. But in return, the privileges it granted were immense. One could vote for their leaders, one could stand for office, one could appeal judgements by Roman magistrates, one was exempt from cruel or unusual punishment and one had legal standing in court to sue for their rights. It was, in short, the granting of full personhood by the state.
Citizenship, thus, in the Roman ideal, was a binding commitment by the state to citizens and by citizens to the state. The state foreswore its right to arbitrary violence, while citizens vowed to serve the aims of the state. It was a definitional social contract governing the relations between the Senate and the people, and it bound the many facets of society together. And, it demanded responsibility from its citizens, who were granted the sacred right to choose their leaders.
The American system was directly inspired by Rome. The Founders read their Polybius and Cicero; the Federalist papers are thick with Roman precedent. The vision of citizenship they conceptualized was meant to be expansive, it was meant to be credal, and it demanded a public that took their obligations seriously. George Washington articulated this cleanly in his farewell address:
It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.
Republican government requires virtue from its constituents because it makes them a partner in rule. The citizen that doesn’t engage seriously with their duty is undermining the very foundation of the republic.
The Roman example is also instructive in showing how that social contract can collapse. Rome transitioned to an Empire after Augustus, and under an autocratic system, both privileges and obligations began to decay. Voting became an empty ritual that eventually stopped altogether. The military became a professional service and conscription steadily waned. Those broad privileges and obligations that defined a Roman steadily lost their primacy, and citizenship transitioned into a political categorization rather than a civic bond. In 212 CE, Caracalla formalized the transition by granting every non-slave in the Empire’s boundaries citizenship—so that everyone was subject to all the taxes.
As the Empire came under pressure from the 3rd century onwards, it was forced to rely on its civic bonds—and found them lacking. In Cannae, in 216 BCE, when 70,000 Romans died in a single day, the state rejected all peace overtures and raised a new army within a month. But when a much smaller army collapsed at Adrianople in 378 CE, the frontiers caved and the emperor had to hire mercenaries to stave off disaster. This pattern repeated with each successive Germanic tribe that pushed inwards. Britain severed itself, the Goths took Spain, and the Vandals conquered North Africa. Each tribe found the structures designed to resist them had grown hollow. The vaunted legions were too few, the civilians fled in advance, and the massive city walls were unmanned. In the end, the Roman state collapsed because no one left cared about it enduring.
America is now undergoing its own collapse in civic faith. Once, we had legions of people actively volunteering their lives to resist the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Russians; now, only 41% of Americans are willing to fight for their country. 19% of Americans under 40 say a direct attack on American territory is not a reason to go to war. And only 43% of Americans support defending Taiwan from an invasion.
More broadly, in 2025, only 41% of Americans said they were “extremely proud” to be American, an all time low. This is especially true for Democrats, the primary home of the professional-managerial class—only 36% of them expressed pride in being American. This understates the issue, because it doesn’t account for generational gaps. Out of Gen Z, only 25% express any pride at being American.
What we have left is a venal nation, consumed by doubt, that’s unwilling to even acknowledge its value or necessity. Our citizenship has been reduced to mere immigration status; our allegiances have been so corroded by cosmopolitan pretension that we shrink from civilizational pride or defense. Yeats wrote our diagnosis a century ago: “The best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passion and intensity.”
This is how Rome fell. As citizenship declined from a binding commitment that bundled privileges and duties into a bureaucratic category without distinction, the civic bonds grew hollow. The social contract—the Senatus Populusque Romanus—became a formality. The state was a provider of services; the people, it’s captive consumers. And when, under external pressure, the state buckled, there was no one willing to keep it alive.
To me, this crisis is incomprehensible. I could never imagine myself as anything but an American.
I am the son of immigrants. My parents left India almost forty years ago for opportunity in a new land. They were raised in relative poverty in a society riven by hereditary privilege and omnipresent hierarchy. To them, America, with its Tocquevillian egalitarianism and its focus on basic equality before the law, was a world anew, and they took to it readily. They didn’t stop being Indian, but they accepted this country as home just as it accepted them as citizens. I always considered being American the greatest privilege they could have granted me. My parents could have done anything, they could have gone anywhere, but they came here, and I thank God for it.
I didn’t need school to instill our country’s greatness to me—it was self-evident. We had the audacity to rebel against the world’s greatest power, and did it for the dignity of the common man. We made the radical choice to build a society around the sanctity of the individual. We fought to preserve that society against those who aimed to pervert it to support human bondage. We looked abroad, saving Europe and Asia from totalitarian inhumanity, and then, we rebuilt them in our image. We engaged in a civilizational struggle to defend the western way of life against global communism—and won. Every American born today is an inheritor of this tradition.
This is, of course, aspirational. One can assemble their own catechism listing the multitudes of ways that we have fallen short of our ideals, and any honest American should. But, I posit that the aspiration is the goal. Belief that the arc of America bends towards justice is the fundamental faith that makes our varying multitudes into one people.
To see instead that the paragon of the new generation, the professional class, is so mired in cynicism that they cannot lift a flag on Independence Day, is shameful. It is a disgrace to our country, it’s a disgrace to the sacrifices my parents made to raise me here. I think about Theodore Roosevelt, speaking about citizenship in a republic in 1910:
Beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.
A nation thus corroded cannot endure.
interesting thoughts here that are worth being expressed.
I'm older than you, so I remember the idea of America being not just the land of the children of immigrants, but the land of immigrants itself. The late 80's and early 90's feels like the high point of this mode, think Yakov Smirnoff, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Reagan "anyone can become an American" speech -- even cartoons like the Don Bluth "American Tail" movie -- these are all part of the American immigration mythos of that special era.
The idea was: America was the country where you became American the moment you set foot on the soil. The assimilative powers of American freedom and prosperity was remarkable.
The American Dream was always a vague combination of these two elements: freedom (values) and prosperity. Those two ideas have since decoupled, and the one-two punch of the decline of "American values" and the frictionless mobility of capital and people today have frayed immigrants' ties to this country.
I agree with you that the idea of America as launchpad that you describe is becoming more common. Immigrants no longer have the strong ties to this country that they used to have, they lack the zealous-convert quality that immigrants from the Cold-War era have (Smirnoff and Schwarzenegger, but also Vietnamese refugees, dispossessed Cubans, Soviet dissidents, aspirational Mexicans and Central Americans, Americaphilic Europeans).
This does create a bit of a vicious circle -- immigrants are regarded with suspicion, subtly alienated from "heritage Americans," which leads to a further feeling of transactionalism of the citizenship contract.
The difference between someone with integrity (“They approached Alysa Liu first, but her father, a student who fled from tanks at Tiananmen square, refused without consideration.”) and those willing to shill for the opposite of everything America stands for. Thanks for writing this.