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Well, it is our origin story, at least for the current incarnation of the United States as a globe-spanning empire with interests and soldiers everywhere. Without WWII as the central part of that story, without Hitler as the stand-in for Satan and the ensuing rise of the Soviet Union as a permanent threat, the rest of the story looks pretty weird. We have 55,000 soldiers in Japan, 36,000 in Germany, a few thousand in Spain and Italy, hundreds in places that most people don't even know exist (what the hell is Diego Garcia?). Everything that comes after WWII is justified by WWII and the new role of the Greater American Empire in which nearly every country on Earth is an American protectorate or an American adversary.
I don't think maintaining buy-in for the modern American civic religion would be possible without centering the 20th century's triumphant struggle for the primacy and legitimacy of Democracy^tm above all other systems.
That is exactly why I object to centering it so strongly in our popular understanding of history. I find the American imperial project abhorrent both to much of the world {Remember Allende and the day before, before the army came} and to the interests of the American people.
Historical analogy, consider the quip*: Athens recovered quickly from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta never recovered from its victory. Sparta would never be the Sparta of Lycurgus, in a pure decline until their defeat against Antipater snuffed them out forever as a real power, they became a mocking footnote in Alexanders memorials "These victories were won by all the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians." Athens would become a center of learning, prominent into the days of Julian the Apostate, our modern framing of Athens descends as much from the later period under Roman rule as from the Athenian Golden Age. Most of what we remember about Sparta was mythmaking by Athenians playing up their great rivals as models or as villains.
I fear that it might be the same for the USA; we may never recover from winning WWII and the Cold War.
*I can never remember where I first heard it or who to attribute it to.
Oh, I'm in a distressing amount of agreement. The initial American project was unstable for all of the reasons that culminated in the Civil War, but the post-Reconstruction nation really seems to me like it could have stayed as a hemispheric superpower indefinitely. The post-WWII arrangement strikes me as being on its last legs, with some major realignment approaching quickly.
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