Let me start with an axiomatic claim: The nation exists in the minds of its people, nowhere else. The nation is not genetic, it is not physical. The French nation only “exists” as long as there is a group of people who recognize each other as French, and probably who are recognized as French by others. When that identity is seen to be a primary basis for some kind of culture, geographic, ethnic, or political identity, rather than just some kind of club, we start to call it a nation. Nationality is particularly notable for its being, one way or another, heritable. But crucially, nations are imagined communities of people who view each other as connected, despite never having met. Identify yourself as an American, and other Americans cluster to you when in non-American places. And that clustering has some kind of ethno-political meaning.

So, what creates national identity? Common examples include shared historical identification, shared language, or a shared traumatic experience, such as war. Solid candidates, all. Crucially, they all related to sharing, that is, experiencing something together. Nationality is, on some level, about togetherness: we Americans are a group that is together for some valuable reason. We share something in common that, say, the villainous Canadians do not share. We’ve got that special American je ne sais quoi. And when you’ve got American-ness, or Roman-ness, or French-ness, or Arab-ness, your fellow ethnics welcome you into their community.

American identity has been historically unique in that it is not closely tied to a specific, narrow ethnic lineage. While many groups have struggled to be included as Americans, broadly speaking American identity has constantly been broadening to include more and more formerly disparate groups, absorbing them into American-ness.

But how? Here, I argue the defining factor is not language or shared trauma, but physical proximity. Immigrants were cut off from the old country and immersed in a new land. And the land, I mean the physical rock and dirt, is meaningful for the nation. Americans have viewed themselves as spiritually land-connected since the beginning. The “new world” had symbolic and emotional significance by virtue of physical separation from the “old world.” It would be a City upon a Hill. The purple mountain majesty, the land of the free… our physical land, or great wildernesses, the empty prairie (of course not actually empty, but viewed as such by Americans of the day), was inspiring to early Americans.

The vision of settlement created an American identity: the common experience of building a new nation. This experience included elements like frontier wars, large-scale immigration, progress of legal reforms, high levels of domestic migration, cheap or free land, expansive democratic enfranchisement, and ultimately an ideology of democratic superiority. But all of this rested on the shared experience of building a nation, a new nation, a young nation.

But today, America has been built. Yes, there are still changes, but we are now an ancien regime in our own right. History has happened to us, and there is no longer “open land” for economic settlement, nor the equivalent of “open land” in terms of legal development. We have interests and institutions as settled and entrenched as any as were ever found in the “old world” our ancestors fled. Thus, the founding experience and essential creator of American identity is dead.