Can these 3 things explain most major differences between the U.S. and the rest of the world?

I’m talking about the ones that get Canadians and Europeans shaking their heads and asking why.

  1. The origins of the country, including westward expansion.
  2. The size of the country (which includes the rural/urban divide).
  3. The Cold War.

America’s attitude towards guns, for example, can be explained by 1 and 2. Attitudes towards health care can be explained by 1 (origins of rugged individualism) and 3, if we expand to include WWII. The Pledge of Alleigance is covered by 3.

I can’t think of many issues like this that doesn’t have roots in at least one of these three factors. Am I missing anything?

Some (but not all*) of those might explain things that Europeans find weird, but Canada? Canada had a big westward expansion, is a large country, and was involved in the Cold War and WWII.

*Europe had kind of a lot to do with the Cold War, and even more to do with WWII if you expand it to include that.

Just because multiple countries lived THROUGH similar events doesn’t mean they did it in the same way. Or are you saying that the way Germany was affected in WWII can be compared to how America was?

Each country has a set of birth legacies. The U.S. one that is emphasized beyond all belief is “We were wronged, and we took action”. That explains a lot.

I think these are all important factors if you don’t account for confirmation bias magnifying the differences and ignoring the similarities. And there are many similarities. Do we include the countries intimately involved in the Cold War, including in conflicts that the US (mostly) stayed out of? Do we include the European country currently considering a right to bear arms?

But as for the urban/rural divide, the US is different from Canada in that it is more diffuse. Most of the Canadian population lives X [del]kilometers[/del] freedom units from the border. The Australian population mostly lives in a handful of cities on the coast.

Puritanism and its Charles II kind of descendant: American evangelicalism. Not just the sex thing but the worldview which perceives whatever isn’t pure, Jesus-copiloted you as threatening outsiders to break off from and fight. From the Civil War to Know Nothingism, white supremacy to Trump. Places with few evangelicals are usually not so different from, say, Canada.

Look here: The Most (and Least) Evangelical States - Lifeway Research
States with most evangelicals: Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi.

States with fewest evangelicals (apart from Utah for obvious reasons): Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut.

Some more from the Washington Post, pay special attention to the white evangelical Protestant-heavy states: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/02/26/the-religious-states-of-america-in-22-maps/?utm_term=.89ad68e42a8c and BeliefNet: State by State Percentage of Evangelicals, Catholics, and Black Protestants - Beliefnet
Yes, I know someone will come in and say not all evangelicals are like that. Sorry I’m letting the vast majority tarnish the reputation of the small minority.

On Tuesday, Paul Krugman made a point that I find utterly convincing. That too many white Americans are opposed to a social safety net even when it would benefit them because they firmly believe that its main beneficiaries will be those people. You can go pretty far with that explanation.

It probably doesn’t explain the fascination with guns though.

But plenty of countries have had a history of colonial settlement with an often hostile indigenous population, an unpoliced frontier, and easy access to firearms. New Zealand is one, we still have a relatively high rate of gun ownership, and yet most Kiwis view the apparent American attitude to firearms with a sort of baffled horror. I mean, I could own a gun if I wanted, a license is easy enough to get here, but why would I? It’s not like I need one.

I suspect it’s less a case of “these experiences made America what it is” and more a case of “America already had an identity, and it was its interaction with these experiences that made America what it is”.

To understand the American attitude, you would have to see how people would react if you started to make suggestions that you believed your government should restrict the ability for the people to own firearms.

I believe you need to make clear that the U.S.A. was never ruled by centuries of inbred royalty and their arbitrary royal edicts. No king, no dukes, no earls, plus no pope. The king who had ruled the colonies was violently rejected.

The Bill of Rights was based on what the former colonies had experianced under royal rule, and would not accept from their new democratic republic.

But it’s in the Constitution! It said I’m allowed to have one!

If you want to get technical, the 2nd and 1st and other amendments don’t grant you any rights. They put limits on restricting existing rights.

My two cents:

  1. Immigration. Except for Native Americans and the Africans who were brought here as slaves, Americans are people who either chose to relocate to a new country or are the descendants of people who made that choice in the relatively recent past. And even the Native Americans and African-Americans are the descendants of people who survived their involuntary experiences.

  2. Geography. America rolled a lot of natural twenties. We have a good base of natural resources, like arable land, water, fossil fuels, mineral resources, and trade routes. And we’re located in a place which allowed us to have a relatively peaceful history.

  3. Short history. America is a recently created country. Our history doesn’t go back thousands of years. Our national identity is something we created in just the last few centuries. So our culture is more flexible and less weighed down by tradition.

Perhaps it would help if we got more examples of things which Canadian and Europeans shake their heads about.

Canada and Australia are similar in terms of immigration, geography and short history.

I’d be curious to see if anyone’s made a survey to see if the worldviews of people in New England and the West coast are closer to Canadians and Europeans or to people in the Bible Belt and the MidWest.

Both of those fit with a Masada mentality/persecution complex which regards outsiders as a threat. Anything less than WASP supremacy means they’re being oppressed.

I would dispute that Canada or Australia have advantageous geography. Both can basically be summed as ten percent good parts and ninety percent empty space that makes the good parts too far apart from each other.

A lot of this is rooted in settler colonialism — taking over vast lands and repopulating them outright — which is more common in the Anglosphere (US, Canada, Australia, NZ, parts of South Africa, and let’s not forget Ulster), than in the other parts of the world, including places influenced by French, Spanish, or Portuguese colonialism (Quebec and Argentina being interesting exceptions).

Add to this the long dependency on race-based slavery — a legacy shared with mixed colonialism places like Brazil, but not so much with the other Anglosphere states — and you can explain much of the distinctiveness of US culture. (I appreciate the prior poster’s description of the evangelist factor as well).

I’m not sure if the differences between the US and Australia have much to do with the differing geography of the two countries (although I do occasionally see people make the case that more collectivist/socialist principles thrive in harsher environments - if your mates don’t help you out in a bad time, it’s much easier to end up dead)

In our case, I’d trace the difference back to the underclass/working class roots of a lot of early Australian society - convicts and troopers. The iconic picture Americans seems to have of yourselves is as individualists, trailblazers and entrepreneurs. The iconic Australian image of ourselves is a working class bloke who’s good to his mates. So - much more investment in unionism, social welfare and general lefty stuff. And very little investment in the glory/greatness of the nation-state - *that *stuff is for “the bosses”, not the ordinary bloke.

Actually, I think America has been doomed by a tendency to mistake words for things.

Interesting subject.

The biggest factor, I think, is Geography, the size of the country and its isolation from other states being separated on each side by oceans and bounded by the frozen north and the impenetrable jungles of Central America to the south. Most countries in the rest of the world are bounded by neighbouring states in which they are in competition or alliance. The US was only bounded by the British Canada and Mexico and the weak Spanish colonies in the west. It managed to come to a settlement with Canada and pursue an opportunity for westward expansion by small wars and the purchase of territory fairly quickly. America was left to expand while the rest of the world was consumed by their own wars and rivalries. It had the resources to develop a self-sustaining economy.

Secondly, the founding of the US benefitted from the best of Enlightenment thinking and this informed the framing of the constitution and this has proved to be durable and adaptable to serve the huge scale of the country. While one of its key provisions is to provide freedom of religion, the culture that developed in the US has a strong religious element. It is largely Protestant and informed by the emphasis on community, a civic culture and a work ethic. The political development of the rest of the world was stymied by the legacy of absolute Kings and the religious wars. The US got a democratic Parliament quite early on and from that came legal framework that formed the basis of a capitalist economic system. The US managed to achieve a single currency, free movement of capital and labour over a vast territory. It did this quite early and benefitted from the great economies of scale that came with that.

Thirdly immigration. The US would have remained a small group of rural plantation owners if it were not for mass immigration. With the people came ideas and a vitality to exploit the opportunities of this vast territory. The US was able to take great advantage of the technology of the industrial revolution, especially the railways, to consolidate the unify the country and this led to its emergence as a superpower in the twentieth century.

What a lucky country! Unless, of course, you happen to be a native American Indian or a victim of the plantation economy of the South.

However, it also has some serious problems.

It has constitution issues. A Constitution written in the 1790s was largely concerned with the political problems that were current at that time and did not anticipate a federalised super-state. Its terms are anachronistic and changing it is slow and difficult and important issues are left for the interpretation by the supreme court and the political balance of its members. Few countries agonise about their constitution as much as the US. It goes through periods of huge internal tension between the federal government on the states and also between the state and the individual.

The US attitude towards Firearms is a symptom of this. While people may claim it is about the freedom to play at being a romantic frontiersman hunting and shooting the wildlife. It is not just a rural thing. There is a deeply entrenched suspicion of the government and the federal government in particular. There are plenty of people in the US who really want nothing to do with government and the gun is the symbol of defiant independence and they claim the right to bear arms in the constitution guarantees this.

Other countries do simply do not have this political argument.

Then there is the religiosity of Americans. Many of the immigrants that founded the country were escaping religious persecution and the US was guaranteed freedom of religion. While taking advantage of this freedom, religious groups are very active in promoting their views and politicising issues that they regard as important. Arguments over the content of schoolbooks, creationism and abortion. This holds the US back in important areas like genetic research.

Other countries don’t have these arguments, they don’t have the ‘Religious Right’.

The Cold War? That was the result of WW2 and that had the greatest change in the US. It consolidated its status as a global superpower with a huge industrialised economy largely unscathed by war. But the lesson of WW2 was that the US cannot be confident its geographic isolation is sufficient defence from the other powerful states. It suffered a surprise attack by the Japanese and this abruptly ended US isolationism. By the end of the war, it was clear developments in aircraft and the ballistic missile had changed everything and the US had to engage in world politics. The US had to compete with the USSR and China who had a mission to spread their ideology around the world. This rivalry and the proxy wars the resulted polarised the politics in many countries between left and right. The US retrenched because of anti-communism.

In other democracies, the debate was more nuanced because the benefits of a centrally planned economy were self-evident in wartime. European states were able to decide which parts of the economy should remain state-controlled and which parts should be left to market forces. It was also informed by pre-war thinking on reforms that followed the Great Depression. Most created state provided housing, education, social security and healthcare systems. A lot of this was built from scratch in countries devastated by war. Just as the US benefitted from being able to create a state from a clean slate in the 1790s, western Europe was able to do the same in the 1940s. They too were able to create constitutions that seek to protect them against the political disasters they had recently experienced.

These debates did not seem to happen in the US and it was left with a private insurance-based healthcare system which is hugely expensive and not at all comprehensive and very patchy welfare provision and social security and an expensive private financed education system. These are major differences with other states, while some of the reasons may have been ideological, the wealth of the country after WW2 would have played a part because these issues may not have risen up the political agenda.

The way to win votes in the US today is to promise a return to that great post-war age of prosperity.