The United States Is Not a Nation!

You could look it up, says Brion McClanahan:

Nation – noun: a large body of people, associated with a particular territory, that is sufficiently conscious of its unity to seek or to possess a government peculiarly its own. (from dictionary.com)

State – noun: the territory, or one of the territories, of a government. (from dictionary.com)

In fact, says McLanahan, the United States was founded on the sovereignty of the distinct cultures that compose it:

Certainly no one in the founding generation would have argued that Virginia and Massachusetts possessed the same cultural heritage. Virginia, with its strong Cavalier tradition, and Massachusetts, with its Puritan or roundhead foundations, were clearly at odds during the seventeenth century and beyond. The two colonies may have been populated by white, English Christians and who shared a common language, "English," but as David Hackett Fischer beautifully explained in his Albion’s Seed, the two cultures were diametrically opposed in almost every conceivable way. From dress to food to speech, Virginia Cavaliers and Massachusetts Yankees were in many ways two separate nations, not simply separate cultures. The "shining city upon a hill" Puritans and their decedents never let Southerners forget their differences, nor did Southerners want to be lumped together with self-righteous Yankees. William Berkeley, the dominant figure in Virginia during the seventeenth century, despised Puritans and fought against them in the English Civil War. Later American sectionalism was little more than an explicit recognition of cultural differences and the existence of separate nations in North America dating to the early days of English settlement.

So the original 13 States were independent nations in the original sense of the word, and the central government was the servant of those States.

How times have changed.