by rayiner | 2025-08-10 20:51:09+00:00
Your point brings up two issues: (1) does American culture exist? and (2) does that culture matter substantively? The answer to both is "yes."

As to (1), people have varied attitudes in every society, but they cluster around distinctive averages. And the same set of basic attitudes can lead to different specific opinions depending on priorities. Conversely, people having different attitudes can converge on the same opinion for different reasons.

It's hard for Americans to understand just how "foreign" foreign people are. You don't get much insight by being a tourist, or interacting with assimilated foreign elites at arm's length in school or the workforce. As a counter-example to your's, my wife and I have almost the same opinions, but are culturally opposites. I'm quite obviously Bangladeshi while my wife is quite obviously a pre-Revolutionary War British American whose family settled Oregon during the wagon-trail era. We didn't even realize how different we were until we had kids and my parents moved nearby, and we had to navigate things like Desi face-saving culture versus Oregonian bluntness, or how our cultures have completely different norms for how kids relate to parents.

And I grew up in Virginia surrounded by Anglos. I didn't even have an Italian American friend until my 30s. You wouldn't even understand half the stuff my mom (who moved here from Bangladesh at 40) thinks. She's a Trump voter--one of the 50% of naturalized citizens who voted for him last year--who is currently mad at Trump over Palestine, and associates "LGBT" with "rednecks." That seems random, but it follows straightforwardly from her culture. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decode it.)

As to (2), these differences matter. Garret Jones's book, linked above, gets into this, addressing cultural differences in things like savings rate and how it affects the economy. As with any social issue, it's hard to prove definitively. But folks like Lee Kuan Yew believed that culture played a huge role in national social and economic development.

To give a concrete example, my dad wanted my brother to go back to school to get his MBA, even though he was on track to become managing director at a bulge bracket investment bank (and ultimately did so). Why? Desi culture has an extreme focus on education and credentials compared to American culture. That's good at the individual level--in that it allows desis to rise to the top in a credential-oriented society. But that attitude also disincentivizes risk-taking and encourages excessive deference to people because of the degrees they have rather than their proven track record. So it would be bad of Silicon Valley became less American and more south asian in that regard. And the fact that you do see south asian entrepreneurs nonetheless is a good example of how assimilation into american culture is a good thing.

I will also point out that, assuming you're a left-leaning American, the importation of foreign attitudes also is a reason for changes in the right wing of the country's politics. Maybe you didn't like Anglo Republicans like Romney or McConnell, but you probably like even less the kinds of folks who can win a majority in a post-Anglo America. The kind of strong-men right wingers who can win elections in Latin America are the same kind of people who can win elections in an increasingly Latinized U.S.