The comparison between American and European identity models is one of the most useful tools for understanding what Europe actually is, because the differences are so structural and so consequential.

American national identity is, in design, ideological. You become American by affirming a set of propositions — about liberty, rights, constitutional government — not by ancestry or cultural inheritance. The proposition is that the idea is prior to the place. This produces a different relationship to history: America is perpetually new, perpetually reinventing itself against its founding documents.