What is Americanness?

I hadn’t heard the word Americanness before. But here it means national character. In any case, these the last two paragraphs of “Europe’s identity crisis Maybe it’s easiest to grasp what a culture is when you’ve lost it” by Lionel Shriver in The Spectator kind of answers the question:

Believe it or not, there was once such a thing as Americanness. Europeans used to make fun of it. In broad strokes, Yanks were seen as open, trusting, innocent, gormless, guileless; a little stupid, or at least ignorant; optimistic and heartbreakingly credulous; sometimes irksomely likable; unsophisticated, loud; insensitive, if often unwittingly; not very funny, but quick to laugh; badly dressed, before everyone was badly dressed; fat, before everyone was fat; easily awed and jarringly direct. But that portrait is growing as dated as the reserved one of the English has become, and I don’t mean there’s a new version. There’s no version. After the onslaught of tens of millions of immigrants from every point of the compass in only the last 30 years – newcomers decreasingly inclined to assimilate – my country grows ever more incoherent. Any quality or behavior seeming “awfully American” is a notion of yesteryear. The US is a geographical location and, as its politicians love to boast, an “idea,” an abstraction. The country less and less connotes a people.

Until recently, most Americans had European roots. That civilizational commonality is finished. The American model of nationality is being tested to the utmost. As Europe embraces the same formula – any freshly arrived foreign resident, presto, is as German as Oktoberfest – national identity becomes an empty suit. “Culture” is one of the hardest words in English to define. Maybe it’s easiest to grasp what a culture is when you’ve lost it.

I think this says it well. Anyone have a different idea?