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Interesting thread. Some musing of my own.
The US is an achievement based culture. It always has been. It's an artifact of having an open frontier for 200+ years (circa 1650 - 1890). If you failed, you simply moved out to the edge and started over.
This shows in the little things everywhere. Look at sports. Football (soccer) has had little grip over here, (although that's very slowly starting to change). Why? How many ties do you get. American culture doesn't not have an abhorrance for losing nearly as much as an abhorrance to not having an achievement (winning or losing).
We seek answers in everything. We place a great emphasis on new knowledge here. (For a wonderful parody of this, see Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, written in 1869).
This leads to a view of government as referee. Government should try to see the "rules of the game" are enforced evenly, and let the best man win. Of course, in areas that are many generations away from the "frontier ethos", there has been a slow change to a more European government world view, as more and more people try to "lock in" their social position and reduce social mobility. This has led to continual friction inside the US itself between the followers of the old "frontier ethos" and the newer (to the US) "social lock-in ethos".
This is enough for a starter....
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