On the one hand, as a country of immigrants, there are tons of places where communities settled and brought their culture with them and so have a strong feeling of connection to their ancestry despite their culture today being completely different. The French Quarter of New Orleans comes to mind. On the other hand, we also kinda traded tradition for consumerism. We lack a real sense of history and culture of our own, making it easy to connect more with our hereditary culture than our country’s.

You can also add to this the ease modern technology has brought in communicating with people across the globe. Americans are probably more likely than just about any other country to have distant family connections in other countries that they are in contact with. If you’re French, you probably come from a generational line of French people who lived not far from you (relatively speaking). By comparison, as a kid, me and my parents went on vacation once to spend a week with some distant relatives of ours in Scotland because we have connections to a specific family castle there.