it really is so insanely funny that american identity is so fucking tied to consumerism and nothing else at all that the oldest concept of american tradtion fascists have to retvrn to is the wold of catalog ads
ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha OK
I once again recommend the book American Nations by Colin Woodard. The reason it doesn't seem like America has a cohesive national identity is because America is not a single nation. It is a single state (political entity), though even that is divided into what America actually refers to as "states," but nationality is more squishy than that.
Taking "freedom" as an example: one of the greatest conflicts of concept in the American ideals of "freedom and liberty" is that they are two separate concepts from two separate ideological origins. Some Americans (generally northern) subscribe to the Germanic concept of "freedom," which refers to civil liberties and connotes "god-given rights" owed to every person. The southern American states were founded on the Latin concept of "liberty," which is a state of free will bestowed upon the privileged and is distinguished by a comparison to those without the rights of liberty. The terms have more or less merged in usage today, but their ideological underpinnings are clear to see in the politics of different American regions.
If the American southwest feels like a different country, it's because it was until very, very recently. Arizona and New Mexico share a national identity with the Mexican state of Chihuahua, not the majority of America. Indian nations are called "nations" because they are not part of American national identity.
Pluralistic states are historically unstable (though you could argue they are also poorly tested). It's considered perilous for a political state to not have a cohesive national identity, which is why political powers work so hard to construct them. This is why, for example, the Chinese government insists that there is a single "Chinese language" when in fact there are dozens of dialects, many of which are not mutually intelligible. It's why Turkey expelled Greeks and committed genocide against Armenians and has persecuted the Kurds since "Turkish identity" was invented in the 1920s. It's part of why indigenous identity everywhere is oppressed. It's part of why many African and Middle Eastern states, their borders drawn by Europeans without regard to national identity, have such bloody histories of conflict.
Consumerism, advertising, and popular media are the primary means America has chosen to construct an artificial national identity. It couldn't be freedom, because we can't even agree on what that means.