[quote=mdk]
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.
[/quote]

I do recognise that it is virtually impossible to do things in a cohesive manner in the US compared to the UK (as an example), and I suppose, in some ways, [i]that's my point[/i]. It's impossible to have that cohesiveness of society in America, and it's extremely decentralised, and yet people still identify so strongly as "American". It seems contradictory, in my mind. But I rather feel we're going to go in circles on this one, and it doesn't help that I'm deliberately generalising and oversimplifying both Americans and their culture.