The American nation-state has found its solution to the problem of pluralism in devotion to the nation itself. The nation-state is made stronger by the absence of shared ends, and the absence indeed of any rational basis on which to argue about ends. In the absence of shared ends, devotion to the nation-state as the end in itself becomes ever more urgent. The nation-state needs the constant crisis of pluralism in order to enact the unum. Indeed, the constant threat of disorder is crucial to any state that defines its indispensability in terms of the security it offers. Pluralism will always be a crisis for the liberal state, and the solution to the crisis of pluralism is to rally around the nation-state, the locus of a mystical communion that rescues us from the conflicts of civil society. Though the American consensus as a natural law tradition of reasoning is dead,…another kind of American consensus is alive and well. It is the consensus that America is, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, “the indispensable nation.”