Unlike Europe and Japan, the USA does not have a strong constraint of the "tradition" and "class"! Although the constitution and Christianity are sometimes regarded as the "tradition" (This is the US characteristic I detest), the USA regards highly of "meritocracy" without taking family, educational, and any social class background into consideration (without using a big government intervention: It is based on people's general will!!), flexibility in industries (E.g. accounting, labour mobility, etc), and pluralism (E.g, More people are integrated into the main stream culture than those in Europe).
Europe is more rational and secular when they establish a legal system, argue about moral and ethics, and revise their civilisation (Actually, the US people tend to think their nation is a utopia regardless of the political ideology; conservative Christian Republican and progressive secular Democrat.
However, Europe suffers from the negative effects of Welfare-state, whose socialism is tolerated under the interest of European nobles, people's stereotypical perception of social backgrounds, and inflexible ways of industrial management.
I know both Europe and the USA are much better than Japan which suffers from the disadvantages whose personality is the combination of the negative and unproductive characteristics of both the USA and Europe. Japan and Japanese conscientious people (I've never expect anything like that for stupid insane Japanese mobs!) have got to learn from the comparative study of Europe and the USA...!
One of the greatest aspects of both North and South America is that, unlike Europe and Asia, they have never had to be worried about the threat of losing land and the state of war among endogenous people. (The Civil War was provoked by neither the threat of losing land nor class war (Some historians say it's because of the class war, but it is not the main cause)). Therefore, neither national socialism such as Fascism and Natizm nor proletarian dictatorship (Cuban revolution was based on the interest of the entire Cuban people, not the proletarians against the endogenous bourgeoisie) has never come into the power!
Furthermore, I admire the USA as the father of Libertarianism! It showed the possibility of anti-traditionalism and laissez-faire economy work well to establish one strong and remarkable civilisation! Unlike the experiment of state-socialism such as the USSR, the experiment of liberal (by means of European definition) economism worked!
Nonetheless, I am only sad that the last US Republican party regime distorted the original identity of the USA. It undermined the liberalist establishment... I am happy to see that the current US democratic party regime under Mr. Obama's conduct seems to replace the distorted establishment with the original idea of the US establishment of liberal integration among people and the frontier spirit, which have been once seen in J.F. Kennedy's regime...!
Ref. (Written in Japanese): http://hansenjuku.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2010/07/post-b06b.html