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Notes -
So your diagnosis as a rootless cosmopolitan is that the nation is dead?
There is a path forward for an American nation of some sort, but its relationship to the one that many here want to restore will be akin to that between 10th century Constantinople and 1st century Rome: if you squint there is continuity but it is obscured by changes in faith, language, ethnicity, and forms of government. The question of whether the future Spanish-speaking Catholic integralist American Empire (just to throw out one possibility) is truly American is one I will leave to the historians.
Since you never had a connection to the country in the first place, don't you think it's plausible that the quality that exalts a nation is invisible to you? I figured that was the source of the disdain inherent in the unironic use of the rootless cosmopolitan label.
Like is there a technologically evolving nation that hasn't changed with each generation? Why would anyone expect a millennium long continuity? There are still readily identifiable qualities that mark someone as American - Americans are loud, arrogant, bombastic, exhibitionist, individualistic, atomised, beautiful, image-obsessed, obese, too skinny, egalitarian, greedy, opinionated, angry and stupid, aggressive and dominating, etc. Unless that changes dramatically there is still a through line imo, but I don't know how to explain the actual meme, I think it's one of those things you get through cultural osmosis or you don't.
I have no problems spotting what in old travel guides would be called national characteristics and feel very keenly the points at which my parents' cultures grind against each other to produce sparks (in a way that they themselves never seem to fully grasp). I don't however hold that these characteristics are inherently bound to any given ethnos and that this should be the primary criterion by which political boundaries are drawn.
Regarding cultural change over time, the question, as Bryan Caplan puts it, is what makes cultural change through immigration worse than cultural change through time, if the end result is equally unrecognizable? The honest answer is usually "I want my descendants to look like me" or to put it autistically "I have a biological imperative to maximize the propagation of my genes." To be fair, my descendants looking like me was never really an option to begin with, so perhaps the value of this is lost on me; from where I stand having descendants at all seems sufficient.
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