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Notes -
Sure. I wasn’t fully satisfied with my ramblings during the user viewpoint post, anyway.
Tl;dr The American ethos is classical-liberal individualism by way of the marketplace of ideas. Everyone has certain rights, and if you play along with America’s rules, we’ll enforce them for you. And you should want to play along.
Points 1-2 incentivize cooperation over defection. Point 3 hedges against some of the worst outcomes for subcultures, again incentivizing cooperation. Point 4 is just business, and Point 5 keeps the whole thing running.
Adopting point 2 is probably the hardest part, and it’s one that plenty of other states have fumbled. We really had to believe that there were other people deserving of those rights. Even then, we almost lost it all due to the economic incentives of denying those rights to some people.
I’m willing to believe that our start was only possible due to the combination of British law, Protestant religion, and our particular economic situation. But once the engine was going, we were able to stabilize and adapt when other cultures were collapsing. We handled the development of nationalism better than basically all of Europe. We won the Cold War right as we reassured ourselves of point 5. Our culture works, and I expect it will continue to work.
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