Being one of the American nations of the New World, the United States is a federated society from top to bottom: politically, culturally, and socially. In New World American countries, the sense of the social emphases race over class to obfuscate the unequal power structures necessary for states predicated on sanctioning their own violence. Colonizers had to hide to pit workers against each other based on race so that attention was too often or too intensely focused on the wealth being funneled to fewer and fewer families. Colonialism's legacy is the arrangement of US social life around race rather than class distinctions, however fanciful and minor.
As a federated culture, everything cultural in the USA filters through layers of familiarity. How you talk is where you live; what you think is what you watch. There are others over there, and a higher central power up there, and what distinguishes you is not your commonality but your locality geographically and behaviorally from others. That states' rights are perpetually in decline and the local is losing against the locus of power in the hyper wealthy is not enough reality to shake the original threads of federated culture that make up the basket. US Americans believe, in their heart of hearts, that nothing can really touch them from on high or below because they are islands in oceans of violence. Their house, their gun, their car, their phone - these are material proofs of the indelible individuality expressed by each citizen node in the greater federated system. Nothing goes through without the consent of the mass; at least in the cultural imagination of US Americans.
These are federated minds. Not communal or even ambitious. Provinciality is celebrated in the New World rather than disdained or mocked. That's because everyone identifying as a US American is only freshly immigrated. Tying ethnics roots to a land takes a tremendous amount of imagination; to tie them to stolen land takes ever so much more. US American don't shy from the task; there is an aggression is our claiming of the geography. In making the system federated, we borrowed heavily from the civilizations we dispossessed while fabricating a myth that said it didn't matter where individuals came from (so immigration could be moral) and that anyway, you can't move an individual from the land he has taken (because it is destiny manifest that he should take and have it). Squatter's rights built over half the nation's territory, and the state employed violence to dress up the theft as discovery.
Federated Minds Online
The Internet might have been a great threat to the illusion of independence that keeps US Americans' blood red. Collective chatter, chatroom vibes, public shaming. Communitarians and humanists habitually underestimate the dark appeal of getting to make believe one is an island. People like to think they are the hero of their own lives. Show them evidence to the contrary - their likeness to a national average say, or their suicidal thoughts as a statistic - and you will be jettisoning the authority of the social sciences into a void labeled 'fancy talk'. Should we be angry with the angry people who are angry they live on stolen, haunted land? Of course US Americans are unhappy; we can read and we can think, and we know every person killed to invent the nation was a special individual...just like us.
Thus we turn to federation metaphors; we are not our government! Those killings were not done by us! We have no responsibility for the dark side of the benefits that make our lives easy today. What's done is done; let's put it behind us; let bygones go bye-bye. In federations, anyway, members are volunteers and associations are not coerced. The business of US America is business, and it's not personal. Fate is what we make, of course, and I can't be held accountable for the actions of my countrymen who I do not know, for I cannot control them.
US Americans share historical nihilism as a cultural trait, because the history is so bloody and unjust that one can only hope the void stares back and shows it has sentience, because then maybe it can be blamed for the ways we acted. US Americans imagine simultaneously that a single country exists where they can belong but also that anytime the country is found doing something wrong, that's the "government" and not "them".
Federated minds are like house flies snacking on bowls of fruits. Here, now here, now here. You can't pin a US American down on a single values-system; morality did not play a part in our cultural fabrications. The opposite did, and we'd rather not talk about it. The immense violence as our baseline, we spend an inordinate amount of time on sales instead of truths. Better to own and sell some of that stolen land than gripe about it.
Hauntings
I'll end this short one here: the haunting of US America is its own fault. I don't know any way out of a haunted house. Metaphysical problems don't have physical solutions. The USA will have to grow up like every other country: born of senseless violence, groping in darkness, shouting out its bad ideas until the culture grows tired of merely liking itself and actually looks in a mirror. There will be another generation of historical revisitation in my lifetime; possibly two more given how the USA accelerates its culture. Is the solution to haunting a gaze in a mirror, to see the ghost is you?