He could have, but that still doesn't dig satisfying deeply into the analysis: why would Americans be prone to evangelical / fundamentalist religion, and a gene

He could have, but that still doesn't dig satisfying deeply into the analysis: why would Americans be prone to evangelical / fundamentalist religion, and a general disdain for knowledge? It isn't a direct line from the Puritans, whose descendants anyway hardly account for the result of successive waves of immigration seen today. There are deeper issues at play such as: The country's birth from a remote colonial revolution with a deep distrust of monarchy, tradition, and authority. Being a destination for various people disenfranchised in their home cultures, who need a new metric of success, coalesce around money as the arbiter of success and indirectly "correctness". Geographic isolationism from other and significantly diverse first world nations. A lingering sense of superiority for our heroic role in WWII. I don't know how much each of these contributes, but I think the answer to the questions Asimov raises is sooner found in, say, de Tocqueville than in Susan Jacoby.