The Czar has kids, like many of you and all of the Gormogons (many of whom admit it, too).

Many readers of a certain age recall well their grade school days, and will likely remember the handful of days spent celebrating one’s heritage. This was about three days out of the year when kids were encouraged to be proud of their ancestry. The Greek kids brought in baklava and dolmades for the others to try. The lone Indian kid brought in saffron rice and naan bread to share. The German kids brought in pretzels and root beer. The Irish kids were allowed to bring in rock-hard soda bread, but most of them showed up with whiskey. Like every day.

The classrooms would be decorated with hand-drawn flags of all nations. Posters would feature a crudely sketched map showing cities, with photos clipped from National Geographic or sliced right out of family home encyclopedias and overly glued to the posterboard showing pastoral scenes with native dancers.

This was easy to do when your last name was Markellos, Srinivas, Mueller, or McNulty; you probably knew their parents who were equally proud of their heritage, and could even predict which nationality the one or two mixed-heritage kids would select. Przybylo was Polish/Hungarian, and she’d bring in kielbasa slices. Gomez was Mexican/Lithuanian, and he’d bring in tamales that everyone would be grossed out by until they tried them.

Maybe your neighborhood was different, but the odds are more likely you were all Gundersons and Andersens and Engstroms in your class. We get that. In which case, you were assigned and ethnic group to research and present.

The Czar’s kids are baffled by this chauvinism. They, and all of their friends, are blends of the most outrageous combinations of nationalities. It’s not uncommon to run into people half-Jamaican, half-French today, and more common to meet younger people who give their nationalities in eighths and sixteenths. The idea of a nationality is rapidly fading away, unless you or your parents are more recent immigrants.

America is naturally like that: grandma and grandpa were strict Italians. The kids all married good Italian boys and girls. The grandkids? Well, they married American kids with mixed-heritage parents, and now the first great-grandchild is named Rocco Nucci, but is technically equal parts Italian, Welsh, Irish, Swedish, Turkish, Laotian, Brazilian, and Mexican.

When asked his nationality or heritage, Rocco will—like the Czar’s kids—proudly announce “American.” And grandma Nucci, who once swore her kids would never marry those filthy Swedes or Turks, weeps with joy over that answer. It shows up in census boxes already, when respondents check multiple boxes other than “White/European descent.”

This sounds nice, but here’s where it all falls apart. In today’s age, that self-identification is a real problem for liberals. It’s tough to pigeon-hole a kid into identity politics when his or her understanding is just so encompassing. “Can’t you be a little more, you know, Mexican?” Because we’re still a long way from being a multi-generational society of mutts, emphasis is overwhelmingly placed on selection. Barack Obama, as you know, is black. Except genetically, he isn’t: he’s neither white nor black but an in-between.

When Dr. Ben Carson and previously Herman Cain were presidential candidates, their “blackness,” whatever that means, was immediately called into question by folks who supported a person who was just as white as he was black. Today’s kids—when they grow to voting age—will probably think that stupid. Their kids, in another 20 years, will be completely lost as to what the hell was going on at the turn of the century.

The fact is that identity politics has reached its useful end among the country’s psychology. The Left knows it, too: and instead of pushing race or whiteness all the time, they’re grasping at gender, at how Hispanic someone is (including whether they’re white Hispanic or black Hispanic), at how Muslim some one is, at how trans or cis someone is. The more they subdivide categories into subcategories to push identity politics, the more you can tell it’s failing.

Ultimately, the kids are right. We are Americans. And the grandkids of today’s immigrants (legal or otherwise) will think so, too. By then, the Left—or whatever remains of this dangerously cartoonish farce of a political psychology—will be worried about how ginger someone is. At how Presbyterian someone is.