It has been said by many stout and neopatriotic Americans something like this: "There is only one culture in this country and that's an American one!" Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote a popular book that was entitled One Nation, Two Cultures (1999) alluding to the obvious seperation between conservative and liberal world views. I'm still trying to figure out where the author herself seems to fit in (given she was providing the perspective of the side she's not a member of), and I'm leaning more and more toward the conservative end of the dichotomy because of all the many statistics and notes she includes as a social historian to try and defend the great "progress" that America enjoys in many different ways. When I was in college, one of the focuses of the freshman seminar was how much the U.S. is a "polyglot" culture, meaning the same thing as the old melting pot metaphor, only the pot that my college professors were referring to didn't homogenize everyone into the Great American Stew. There were various different and distinct tastes that you could pick out (and discard too if that's what you wanted), each with its own global and cultural origins.

Above are three different views on what kind of culture exists in America, and except perhaps for the first one there's more than a kernal of truth in each. However, I'm going to give you another view of America that can't be labeled too well beyond calling it a "culture of one." There is no dichotomy in which a person is easily assigned to one end of the spectrum or the other as conservative or liberal, or even placed in the center and considered moderate for that matter. It's a continuum that doesn't contain labels; it contains actual people who are individuals (whether they each act as an individual or as the conformist) no matter what cultural heritage they can claim. Each person is capable of thinking for him or herself, and even though there might be many similarities in the human experience each of us have, it's time to stop downplaying the existential fact that there are no two people exactly alike--not even identical twins.

(addendum) More notes on Himmelfarb's book: One Nation, Two Cultures:

According to Himmelfarb, bomemian or "alternative" lifestyles in contrast to a more traditional American way of life are now "tolerated" and accepted in the U.S. --My question is BY WHOM? It's like she wrote the book as a conservative in 1999 because she wanted to present an image of a division between two cultures in America for the sake of getting conservatives worried about the state of the union and vote for Bush in the 2000 election! She included all these statistics but her final evaluation is that the "liberal" way of life has become more "tolerated?" That's only the case if you're a conservative. This book has so much political bias disguised as social history it's not tolerable by any but the most conservative reader.

Why do these people keep asking Americans: Do you want THIS kind of America or do you want THAT kind? The dichotomous evaluation is so misleading!--as if even the fabricated dichotomy these people create is being enforced by them so they can make sure they stay in control.