| > You are missing a very important point which is that the US is a country of immigration and of different states the US is a very very very big country. And yet not even the biggest country in North America, an entire continent of immigration; the only difference between the people in what is now the USA and what is now Canada was the degree of loyalism to the British. > America IS the land of opportunity and I would challenge you to find any other country which provides better opportunity and still protect your rights as well. For that not to be just an empty slogan you'd have to explain what you mean by "opportunity" and "rights", to which races and genders those opportunities and rights have historically applied to in actuality, and how you think every other country suppresses or represses those rights or opportunities. > So the country is build on tough women and men. The USA was "built" (leaving aside how) by, among others, Danes, Dutch and Germans. I don't understand how they suddenly became tougher, just by stepping on a boat. Edit: and there goes the autodownvote bot, within not even enough time to read this post. |
Stepping on that boat was risk taking. I think they'd teach their children those same values.
But I think the bigger difference in US v. European culture is that inside America there was no landed gentry. The Northeast had some "society," but for long streches of American history anyone could go buy land for cheap and farm.
Without an intrenched gentry and an intrenched lower class, American class has always been more mobile. There were certainly rich and poor, but poor enterprising people could get land much cheaper by moving west.
Industrialization changed that, but by that time American culture was already distinct. Plus, America was richer than than Europe during the 20th century. Our middle class had it pretty good.
Canada is more like American culture than British.