I won't meditate upon on my own opinion about the present day, but I will say this. I envy previous generations, for whom this question was a lot easier to answer. My two great-uncles were refugees, they fled Turkey in the wake of the Genoicide of 1915, they spoke maybe three sentences of English and had nothing but the clothes on their back. They stepped off the boat in 1918 and enlisted, given citizenship right there. For them in was simple: America was a place of refuge. I don't doubt for many today it is the same. But back then, the media was newspapers and radio. Not as much spin. World War II, it was so easy...there was this madman Hitler who was plotting to take over the world, in the tradition of all grand conquerors of history, and it was question of your realy being in danger. Today all wars are not dramatic, they are guerrilla or at least dirty little unconventional affairs where the cause is murly and the methods even more so.
What disturbs me is even more is that these days America, seems at least to need a war or conflcit, an enemy, to both define itself and test its citizens loyalty. Society itself is becoming more militarized, and miltary service defines strength, and "peaceful" people more contemptuous. We are being asked to assert our patriotism in militant ways. There is no peaceful way to be a patriot. When I see tanks parked in a park with armed sodiers standing around and parents taking their little toddlers up to the tanks and sitting them on them and letting the little ones touch them and look up wonderingly, I dismays me and disturbs me to the very core. My sentiment is with Faramir: "I do not love the sword for its brightness, not the arrow for its swiftness..." etc. Americahas always been a war-loving nation to an extent, but there was a strong pacifist streak here too. More crazy communes and societies, etc.
It's complicated beyond belief. The nation-state is a modern construction, but all I can say is, given a choice between the modern, centralized, bearucratic nation-state with all its clunky machinery of state, and the fuedal city-state or polis (feudalism at its best), I'll take the nation-state, with all its flaws. Our present day is filled with a lamentable dearth of leaders, but at leas the structures they represent lurch along.