The idea goes back to Frederick Jackson Turner, who in the 1890s began to articulate a theory that became known as the Frontier Thesis, or the Turner Thesis. According to this thesis, the vast expanse of free land that was available to the newly arriving populations was both a stern master that modified, shaped, and disciplined the people who entered into it while also providing them with the resources to convert their energy first into self-sufficiency and, eventually, into economic success on a spectacular level.
The wilderness made the people unique, and it also made them successful. The availability of cheap land in large quantities was a democratizing force that worked on a practical level, as opposed to the merely theoretical level of Locke and the philosophes in Europe. The practical democracy of small farms was more easily convertible into authentic political power than the theoretical democracy of rights and freedoms. The legal rights and freedoms that Americans enjoy (which were and still are very real) were nevertheless only sustainable because they rested on a practical bedrock of democratic land ownership that already existed.
France, for instance, proceeded without the practical reality of democratic land ownership, and the result was internal violence on a vast scale and the resulting animosity between the privileged and the common, as well as between Paris and the rest of France, that continues today, and which has no parallel in American society. That fault line remains in effect in French society, as it does for a multitude of nations who followed the French example of revolution (for example, the entirety of Latin America).
The land has laid down the basic habits of American society, which I like to think of as "tensions".
First, there is the tension between acquisitiveness and altruism. We have the belief, generally speaking, that upward mobility is a noble goal for the individual, or for the family collectively; that the possession of things is a legitimate goal of a well-directed life. This was the aim of the early Virginia colony, men like Walter Raliegh and John Rolfe. On the other hand, we also have had handed down to us that notion that it is our mission (our destiny, if you want) to perfect human society, to correct the mistakes of the "old world" here in the new. Winthrop referred to the "City on a Hill", just as LBJ referred to the Great Society. The Obama healthcare plan can be seen as an echo of this tradition, regardless of what we might think of its wisdom. The instinct toward progress and perfection is not, perhaps, uniquely American, but the notion that this project can actually be realized through the collective energy of a people is uniquely American. In earlier times, it was normally the project of religious communities, such as Winthrop's, or Brigham Young's. In later times, it has become the project of progressives. But the impulse to do so forms a line of continuity that can easily be traced.
Second, there is the tension between extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. The wilderness was both beautiful and deadly. It could provide and it could kill. The vastness of the land pandered to our sense of granduer, and so we tend to be drawn to millenniarian visions of greatness. We believe in our ability to conquer, to win, to achieve anything we set our mind to. We built the railroads to the Pacific, we won a two-front war against enemies that had subdued the other great powers, we created the atomic bomb, and we went to the moon. However, the vastness of the land also meant that it was essentially unknown, mysterious, and at times terrifying. The wilderness also made us sensitive to our impotence, vis a vis nature, to a degree that perhaps other societies are not. Our optimism mingles with the doom, as the Bellamy Brothers sang, and we have a long history of building spectacular successes right up to the edge of catastrophe, just as Hollywood is built on a fault line, just as the boom of the 1950s was followed by Vietnam. And when the catastrophe comes, we turn inward with a sense of guilt and self-hatred that I think is more acute than other societies feel. Because our blessings have been so great, we feel excessively irresponsible and inadequate when things go wrong. We are susceptible to being trapped in the sentimentality of the reforming spirit, even to the point that it commits us to absurd projects such as the War on Poverty, or (some might say) universal healthcare.
What has changed in the last hundred years is that the frontier is gone. There is no more vast expanse of free land to fuel our exceptions. However, the cultural furniture that it put in place remains fixed in American society. The problem as I see it is that the tensions have reached the point where they have produced a mentality that is not practical, indeed that is not financially possible in the long run. The belief that we can achieve whatever we set our mind to was, in previous times, sustained by an engine of capital (the land) that wasn't yet overwhelmed by the weight of our dreams. But as time has passed, or dreams, our commitments, our sentimentalities have become so ambitious that the land can no longer bear it.
My 2 cents.
