Well, heric, I understand what you're saying in the sense of American diversity. Yes, there is great diversity in the USA.

What I was thinking was more along the lines of the American tendency toward extremes in authoritarianism and severity of various social rules...and how much that is supported by an emotionally reactive population.

For instance, capital punishment is still practiced widely in the USA. It is not practiced in most other western democracies any longer. The reason it's practiced widely in the USA is not because it reduces crime. It doesn't reduce crime. It's because Americans tend to let violent emotions think for them...and violent emotions do not lead to good decision-making. Capital punishment is NOT something that improves law enforcement, it's something that satisfies people's lust for vengeance.

You can see this kind of tendency throughout American history. The 13 states opted to secure various rights and representation through a violent revolution against the English crown. The population in Canada and/or Australia secured those very same rights through peaceful negotiation with the crown. The USA fought over 500 Indian wars. Canada, in the same historical period, had one Indian war (the Riel Rebellion). The USA has a far higher per capita incidence of violent crime than is found in Canada or western Europe....and far more of its own people in prison per capita than Canada or western Europe.

Do you follow my line of reasoning on this? There has, historically speaking, been a strong tendency in the USA to sanction the uses and glorification of violence and extreme punishment to solve problems, and it has been passed on in a subliminal fashion to the whole population through the dramatic tales of violence and frontier lawlessness found in American history, movies, books, comics, etc. That's the problem. It's an attitude problem. Punitive attitudes lead to a punitive and authoritarian system.