I'd speculate that part of the reason for why the U.S. is as dysfunctional as it is is that it still has yet to find its cultural bearings, and many people don'

I'd speculate that part of the reason for why the U.S. is as dysfunctional as it is is that it still has yet to find its cultural bearings, and many people don't have the same sense of place that Europeans have. When you go to a small village in France, it seems to me that many people will be able to recount with pride (or shame) the most significant events that made that village stand out across hundreds of years of history. In contrast, small villages in New York State or California only have around 300 years of history at best, and most residents were uprooted from their ancestral homes less than a century ago, so the same sense of grounding and appreciation for history is not there. Even the wounds of the American Civil War have not fully healed and probably won't fully until a few centuries from now.