Nicholas Wade

And yet it really is just an extended tribe.

It's got everything except kinship.

And what it has is...

Our kinship is the glue of tribes.

A nation-state has various surrogates, like people usually have a common language, a common religion, a common ethnicity, a common sort of founding narrative of how their nation came to be.

And these things are very effective, because nations are so effective, their problem often is not that they're too weak, but they're too strong, so they will make war against their neighbors.

I definitely think that nations are the best way we have yet evolved of organizing ourselves.

And it seems to me a great shame that the sinews of nationhood are often ignored or rejected or repudiated, particularly by the left.

So this is a particularly serious problem, I would think, for the U.S., because many countries are sort of natural nations, and they have a little Scandinavian democracy.

They all speak the same language.

They have the same religion.

They have contiguous borders.

So the U.S.,

It used to be like that when it was primarily settled by English Protestants very early on.

Because of its wonderfully flexible constitution, it was then able to embrace lots of other nations, mostly Christian nations, mostly Europeans.

and while retaining its cohesiveness.

But if you look at it now, many of the sinews of nationhood are fading.

Americans used to be very religious.

They're not so religious now.

They're following Europe in that pattern.