By Richard D. Erlich

Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is politically a Baby Boomer, and I'm among the throngs hoping the 2008 presidential election "turns the page" on the culture wars of the 1990s, which means getting beyond the Boomer clashes of the 1960s. Still, the underlying issues will remain, and a key one is good to think about around the Fourth of July: What is America?

From the ads on TV, you'd think we're just an economy, a conglomeration of consumers and hustlers. But we'll undoubtedly get an old-fashioned Fourth of July speech or two that remind us of the birth of the Great Experiment: the American Republic. That's one theory, and the one I like. But the Republic has competitors.

In a book in 1999, Patrick J. Buchanan argued that we're "A Republic, Not an Empire," so there's the imperial option, but that one is out of favor. For a while we won't be hearing about a benevolent American empire using our military to bring democracy and free-market civilization to Earth's lesser folk. Afghanistan, as a cynical observation has it, is where empires go to die, and Iraq and Afghanistan have exhausted for a long while any US fantasies of empire.

What competes with the Republic — in most Americans' vocabularies and subconscious minds, and as a subtext of conscious debate — is America as a nation.

I'm old enough to remember people for whom there was nothing subconscious or subtextual about it: people declaring America "a White Protestant Nation." We've progressed, and the "White" has mostly dropped out, and "Protestant" has been ambiguously expanded; so what you hear nowadays is "Christian nation" or sometimes "Judeo-Christian nation," or, most often, just "nation," with the listener free to supply any modifiers.

On the one side, then, there's the republic, perhaps "a secular revolutionary republic," in, if I recall correctly, Anthony Burgess's disapproving formulation.

Or we may be a nation: one people, with a shared history and descent, and maybe with one religion — or at least one monotheistic religious tradition.

How you usually see us has important implications.

To start with, a Christian nation includes just Christians and excludes a lot of American citizens, including Catholics if the nation is run by people who can say, as one of my students did, "I used to by Catholic, but now I'm a Christian."

A nation can have all sorts of governments, with the most "natural" one probably monarchy: nations are tribes "writ large," and tribes can be confederations of clans — and clans can be seen as big extended families. As the father is the natural head of the family, even so, the king is the natural head of the nation.

Trust me on this: I'm not old enough to have heard such arguments in church, but I've studied enough English history to have read the old homilies on obedience to rulers. Nowadays, most people would never make such arguments explicitly: we speak of ourselves as democrats, not mere republicans. Still, the old arguments for kingly prerogatives are implicit in arguments for unrestrained presidential power, or talking about the president as "commander-in-chief," even over civilians — reversing the theory of the president as chief executive but still a servant of the (capital "P") People.

A republic can have only one philosophy of government: republican, and you become a citizen of the American by loyalty to that doctrine. Implicitly or explicitly you agree to defend the Constitution of the United States, and, in theory, you're willing to risk your life for that Constitution and even put your children at risk, if need be, to defend it.

For the nation, you can pledge allegiance to the flag and throw in the Republic almost as an afterthought. And if the Constitution gets in the way of protecting the nation — most centrally its people and maybe its flag — then elements of the Constitution can go.

If America is the nation, national security and survival trumps all, and even national symbols become nearly sacred.

We're not going to get beyond this tension, and to some extent shouldn't. The republicans get the Glorious Fourth (of July) and get to wave the flag a bit on the Fourth and read the Declaration of Independence; the nationalists have the flag most other days, and patriotic songs and the possibility of celebrating the very neat holiday of a religious, family Thanksgiving.

But the tension is serious.

The question came up over printing the Pentagon Papers of how many Americans one might sacrifice for the First Amendment, and that question remains with protecting Americans against terrorism. I'm a republican, and I'm willing to put myself and other Americans at some risk to protect America: primarily the Constitution, the rights and liberties of Americans. So I'm a mild threat to the nation. And from a republican point of view, people willing to sacrifice key liberties for safety are among the "enemies foreign and domestic" against whom the Constitution must be protected.

We need "to turn the page"; but the political conflict will continue.

Richard D. Erlich is a professor emeritus in English at Miami University, Oxford, OH, currently living in Ventura County, California.