This connects to the second observation, which is just the intense difference between America experienced as a geographic entity, a continental empire, and America experienced as a virtual landscape, via the screens and apps through which we increasingly encounter one another.

The comparison does not reflect well on the virtual America, which feels crowded and exhausting, a thousand-odd people screaming at one another in a medium-size hotel ballroom. I don’t want to say that crossing the physical America exposes the online version as “unreal,” since online life is quite real in its own way, and our national parks and roadside attractions aren’t the places where most Americans live their daily lives.

But the state-to-state spaciousness of this country, its complexity and diversity and simple wildness, still feels like a potential asset to be set against the claustrophobia of small-screen politics and culture wars — a release valve that not every divided society enjoys, a means of escape and reinvention that the internet constrains but, as yet, has not eliminated.

Seeing America gives you hope for America. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have eight more hours in a crowded minivan ahead.