By Stephen P. White, The Catholic Thing - In 2026, the United States will celebrate our semiquincentennial; 250 years is a long time in terms of one human life. But it is not so very long a lifespan for a people, a nation. I say nation, not government, because I take it that there is such a thing as an American nation, which predates our Constitution and the government it established... Not that it is easy to define a nation as something distinct from its government, particularly in the American case. An Englishman can list the many forms of government under which the English nation has existed. Same for a Frenchman or a Pole. In the latter case, the Polish nation managed to survive more than a century of partition during which no Poland appeared on a map and there was no Polish government.