The second reason has to do with the moral basis, which is the protection of human autonomy. ...If you ask, in what sense could a liberal believe tha… - Francis Fukuyama

The other big issue is an emotional one. We tend to feel the greatest bonds of solidarity with people that are close to us. There are very few true citizens of the world. We're citizens of individual countries and we really feel the closest bonds to people that live within our nation, and therefore... the nation becomes a kind of social glue. But if you're going to make a national identity compatible with liberalism, it has to be the right kind of national identity. It has to be one that is open to all of the citizens that actually live in the territory of the nation. It can't exclude certain groups by race, by ethnicity, by religious belief and the like, and therefore it needs to be an open identity that is based on essentially liberal ideas.

The final thing... the question of the nation, and the role of the nation in liberalism... [T]here would seem to be a tension between liberalism's belief that all human beings enjoy... the same basic set of human rights, and the fact that we are divided up into s, in which the authority to enforce those rights is territorially limited. ...[T]his contradiction can be bridged because... there is a liberal form of national identity which is not only possible, but... necessary if a liberal society is going to succeed.

[T]his has been going on in other countries... including in the United States, where there has been a deepening polarization between a red... and a blue America that is defined partly by... these feelings of loss of community with regard to both religion and nation.