What does it mean to be American? I’ve been pondering this recently for two reasons.

First of all, and most obviously, the election and its aftermath, along with much public agonizing about whether we’re a nation divided or a nation of moderates enslaved by our respective lunatic fringes; whether we’re red and blue or various shades of purple.

The second reason is that I’ve been host for a few weeks to a gracious outsider, a young visiting journalist from central Asia, to whom I need to try to explain us. Which isn’t easy.

There are a lot of us and we come in so many colors and guises.

Gaybulla is from Tashkent, the son of a Muslim family that has lived, like all his fellow-Uzbeks, through Soviet rule and then recent independence. He tells me things about his homeland, its traditions that go back so many centuries, and although his nation is very young, his culture seems, by comparison with ours, a steady and venerable thing.

And so, through many evenings of conversation, I try to find a way to tell him what unites all of us: conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, churchgoers and secular humanists, coast-dwellers and heartlanders. Finally, the other night, I think I hit it.

Almost all of us, I told him, come from somewhere else. We come from people who either decided to move across the world or got moved here for some cataclysmic reason. We eat change for breakfast. Our national sport is reinventing ourselves.

Along with that pursuit, I think, goes a set of assumptions so deep-seated that we may not even realize we share them. Americans have many vices, but in general we are not a nation of whiners. We believe in personal responsibility. If we don’t like something, we assume we need to change it, not wait around for someone else to do it.

Democrats, however, have been veering dangerously close to whiny in the past couple of weeks. I guess it’s understandable, but I hope it doesn’t last too long. I’m already getting fairly sick of the e-mails demanding endless recounts of votes in Upper Whoop-whoop and congressional investigations of diabolical plots to rig the outcome. It’s over, guys. Let’s move on.

That means (being American) starting to take some responsibility for what happened.

Sure, we came close. So did Richard Nixon in 1960. Close doesn’t mean we really won, or the election was stolen. Close elections happen. Somebody wins, somebody loses. The last traumatic one left its scars – understandable. But this isn’t 2000.

So, in the American spirit of taking responsibility, let’s get on with it. We have four years to reinvent ourselves, and four years is a long time. It wouldn’t hurt to stop thrashing around and making ugly noises about the power of the religious right. We can’t change what happened.

What we can change is ourselves. We can start by admitting that our own side of the street could use some cleaning. I’ve gotten hundreds of e-mails in the past couple of weeks, and although a few of them are from people who think I will fry in eternal hot Crisco for supporting women’s right to abortion and gay people’s right to live as they choose, most of them are civil, thoughtful, genuine attempts at communication.

One was from a mother in California (yes, my columns sometimes get picked up and fly all over the country). She’s a very traditional Christian who also believes in the public schools – but in those schools her kids were exposed to explicit descriptions of how gay people have sex.

Now, I can understand the reasoning behind this. If you’re going to teach sex education, and you’re convinced that gay people should not be marginalized, then why not teach about gay sex?

Because most Americans are not there, that’s why. And much as many liberals shudder at the power of the religious right in the Republican Party, a lot of conservatives see this sort of thing as evidence of the lunatic left’s hold on the Democrats. We’re guilty, too.

Republicans have written to me recently to say that they don’t support the death penalty, that they don’t want to criminalize abortion, that they favor gun control. But for whatever reason – allegedly treasonous statements about Vietnam, alleged flip-flopping on the war, you choose – they didn’t trust John Kerry.

Last week, presidents of both parties gathered in Little Rock, Ark., to honor the most successful Democratic politician of my adult lifetime. It’s uncomfortably fitting that Bill Clinton was brought down by his own lack of personal discipline. It’s also timely that we honor him now, as Democrats scramble to recover from defeat. Clinton taught some important lessons the party forgot with blinding speed: Most Americans live in the middle; most Americans want some form of social justice that also demands personal responsibility; most Americans want a leader they actually like as a person.

Democrats need badly to clean their own house. That means letting go forever the assumption that the urban coast-dwellers and the leftover union movement can carry them to victory; also that they can choose people, however well qualified, who have no ability to connect with the nation’s great middle. Which, by the way, means a friendly but firm “No” right from the get-go to the other Clinton. Sorry, Hillary.

Finally, the Democratic Party bureaucracy needs purging. There are still too many unimaginative hacks left over from the Stone Age clogging its ranks, weighing it down.

America is still a story about change. If you’re a Democrat this month, you need more than ever to believe that.