[NoImmatureAdHom]

Interesting to note that only ~44% of U.S. citizens have a passport[0] and most haven't ever left the country. My American parents got their passports at age 50 or thereabouts. The U.S. is big. The only other countries you can get to by land are Canada and Mexico, and only Mexico is meaningfully different culturally (sorry Canada). Everywhere else that's different is a long, pretty expensive plane flight away. If you're in the center, you're far from basically everything that isn't America. Some villages in Europe may have similar provincial people, but I get the sense they are a lot rarer.

The U.S. is probably better compared to the E.U., or maybe Europe as a whole, in most contexts. It has centralized federal power for some things (like external affairs: diplomacy, war), but its power internally is quite weak sometimes (e.g., domestic enforcement of drug law). It's more like a loose grouping of countries than many people believe.

0:https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-... divide # of passports in circulation by population (~332M). Probably a slight under-estimate because some people counted in "population" might not be eligible for a passport.