[quote=Halo]
A society isn't just made up of communal identity, though, is it? I'm not arguing that there's no sense of American communal identity. I'm arguing that Americans often seem opposed to the idea of participating in and contributing to their wider, "American" society. They take care of themselves, and they may take care of their local communities (as So Boerd highlighted with the generosity article), but in terms of working together, as a part of a cohesive American society? There's no desire to. There's no desire to help American people in dire straits if they're not a part of your locale. And what I struggle to understand is how someone can take pride in , and society, and yet not want to have fuck all to do with society, outside of, perhaps, that sense of communal identity. An "every man for themselves" attitude does not gel with the fervour of patriotism many Americans show, regardless of how much they recognise that "every man" likes football.
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Remember too the size of the country we're talking about. If it were a state, Great Britain wouldn't break the top ten largest by land area. It would be the most populous, but also the densest, and still only 1/5th the national population (unless we're counting the 300m we've already got, in which case you'd only account for about 15%). It's a great geopolitics study -- meaning, the relationship between geography and politics, like why are rice-climates more communal than wheat-climates. End of the day people still operate like people, once you get to understand the reasons they adopt certain behaviors, we're all pretty much the same.