I really don't see that going on here. Many are "proud to be an American," with little regard to the fact there is a difference between places like New York and Seattle, Little Rock and Wichita, and "small town America" like Cicero or Greentown (two small towns in Indiana). Northern states are different than Southern states, and Washington DC seemed to be pretty different itself from the one time I visited, and I've heard California is an entirely different world.
I'm from California. I've been to Oregon, Washington State, and New York City. While the former two are somewhat familiar (West Coast), the latter somehow felt more foreign to me than Shizuoka in Japan did (probably by virtue of me being an otaku).
Of course there are also disasporic population, recent immigrant populations, and other such grounds, but from where I stand there are many "proud Americans" who don't really care for their heritage any deeper than America, and being more specific about what part of America they come from, such as the South, small town, or the lands their family has lived on for several generations.
It may just be that I have never fit in where I live enough to take up the values of small town America to see it as anything important. Just a bunch of prayers before public meetings, offense taken if you don't believe in God (more specifically the Christian god), and deep fried pretty-much-just-about-anything (even Pepsi) during county fairs.
I think a lot of it does depend on where you're from. In hindsight, it's not just Americans who do the whole "one-world, one people, no separate nations" thing. Heck, it was a Brit who wrote
Imagine, and I remember the Celtic Women sang the song
One World.
I'm not from Small Town America. I'm from a suburb, and a pretty small one at that, not too far from San Francisco. The hyper-liberal reputation is well-deserved. Problem is that this also comes with this global universalist sentiment, which I was raised with. I was exposed to that all the time, and once believed in very strongly.
But here's the thing: as I've come to listen to the voices of those people who aren't part of that zeitgeist (i.e., people who have been historically subjugated by these foreign invaders who
now deny that their culture has no value because we're all nothing more than
homo sapiens), that sense of cultural identity isn't just important to them: it's quite literally
everything. It's not just a sense of national identity, it's Identity, with language, culture, shared experience, and community all working together. To implement the one-world (by which I mean the type that seeks to erase all sense of distinct cultural identity, not the more loose federation-type that you talked about), would be to stip them all of that, everything that they know and cherish.
My native [language], now I must forgo,
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp.
Within my mouth you have enjail'd my tongue.
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now.
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?
-Richard II
Nationalism is really easy to corrupt and misuse, and has been historically at the cost of millions of lives. I absolutely am not a nationalist, except maybe in my support for the independence of one of my ancestral lands but which I've never been to, and which I'm not a citizen of, and who's indigenous language I mourn the slow, ongoing death of. But global universalism can also be easily corrupted and misused, and arguably, it has been.
Consider this frightening concept: nationalism being
combined with global universalism. Separate, I think they both can have pros and cons depending on the situation, but combined into a whole, it'd be nothing less than a
nightmare scenario.
A bit like assuming someone who has a thing for chocolate ice cream must hate vanilla.
