http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,715339,00.html"American Has Become Too European"
And, it's too good not to give you the most important paragraph:
The settlers of the New World rejected everything, which included throwing out anything with a semblance of state authority. They fled Europe to find freedom. The sole shared goal of the settlers was to obtain individual freedom and live independently, which included the freedom to say what they wanted, believe what they wanted and write what they wanted. The state was seen as a way to facilitate this goal. The state should not interfere in people's lives, aside from securing freedom, peace and security. Economic prosperity was seen as the responsibility of the individual.
If you take this belief away from Americans, you are destroying the binds which interlink America's heterogeneous society. Removing this belief could lead to conflicts between different sections of society, clashes which have long bubbled beneath the surface.
Emphasis mine.
America is united by an
ideal. There are no unifying bonds of race, religion, or even culture (North, South, Midwest, West, Texas vs Georgia, Massachusetts vs Maine, huggers vs handshakes, dude vs sir, etc...)in our country. Without that basis, he's exactly right: there is nothing to unify this country.
We cannot run a European socialist model even as well as the European socialists do. (And that's saying a lot.)
