Every nation and society has their own collective philosophy. Whether or not there are influences from the external, which there most definitely are, surveying the various cultures which have come and gone you'll notice they're all marked by distinct internal values.
We can speculate on the origins of such a process, but without getting academic, you can see it for what it is fairly simply. It's said that the Minoans were the "first link in the European chain" and there's good evidence for this as that little society in the Mediterranean subsequently sparked much of what's associated with Western Civilization.
Ernest Renan's spirit principle which he referred to in his late 19th century talk—What is a Nation, insightfully indicated that a nation or collective is not based off superficial aspects such as race or geography; but rather it's where your soul is. I'm sure folks already have an intuition about this, although I think it's of use to remind others that:
What you consider your country, is whichever place your most cherished values exist.
For some, perhaps the most uncompromising of individualists, they have no country and heed what Mr. Jefferson said of merchants:
Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
Associations must be established freely for any sort of authentic relationships to develop; and it doesn't have to be large regions like countries either, perhaps you mostly share interests with a particular city or something figuratively like the transatlantic Republic of Letters during the Enlightenment.
The record of statism, using political means to intervene in society, has a long and frankly disappointing history. In my previous post I discussed how the State from its inception as a conquering group, has the sole concern of controlling and redistributing resources; it's made up of individuals who come together forming a gang, and then use whatever means necessary to achieve this end.
These individuals with the sagacity to use political means get to have all the advantages expediency allows for. Intuitively, we are all well aware humanity is opportunistic, so if you can gain enough power to appropriate the labor or capital of others, it's easy to see why some would want do it.
Every State known to man has started with this understanding, it just takes a type of society to allow it to happen. Without a fragment of society pushing for politically sponsored advantages the State would become minimal state relying only on confiscation for their power; which is along the lines the Articles of Confederation and what the anti-federalists hoped for.
Regardless of the romanticism surrounding the founding of the US, the Constitutional convention in 1787 was clearly a victory for the centralizers creating a strong State just like back in Europe. The goal was to get rid of the Articles which kept the mechanism of the State somewhat under supervision.
The settlers in North America also brought with them a lot of ideas from Europe, most importantly the economic principles of mercantilism, a type crony-capitalism where monopolistic privilege is given to a chosen few, as well as the intermingling of religion and secular social values from Puritanism. With the quasi-religious devotion towards the duty of work mixed with protectionism, subsidies, monopolizing, and other forms of intervention in markets, you had a powerful concoction for a foundation of statism to grow.
The early colonialists and their beneficiaries overseas were operating under the merchant-state model which was the accepted norm of how economics was dealt with. Let's keep in mind that Adams Smith's attack on mercantilism was not even heard of until well over a century later.
Along with Tocqueville, Michel Chevalier was another Frenchman who traveled to North America in the 19th century to study its civilization. He was less known, though his approach was different being that he was trained as a free market economist so he went out to inspect American system of public works. During his time their he made some critical observations only an outsider could make:
The Americans are the most enterprising of men, and the most aspiring of people...The American democracy is imperious and overbearing towards foreign people...Pride is ridiculous in an enervated and inert people, but in an enterprising, active, vigourous nation, it is consciousness of power, and confidence in its high destiny.
In general, the American is little disposed to be contented; his idea of equality is to be inferior to none, but he endeavours to rise only in one direction. His only means, and the object of his whole thought, is to subdue the material world, or, in other words, it is industry in its various branches, business, speculation, work, action. To this sole object every thing is made subordinate, education, politics, private and public life. Every thing in American society, from religion and morals to domestic usages and daily habits of life, is bent in the direction of this common aim of each and all...Speculation and business, work and action, these, then, under various forms, make the exclusive object to which the Americans have devoted themselves, with a zeal that amounts to fanaticism; this was marked out for them by the finger of Providence, in order that a continent should be brought under the dominion of civilisation with the least possible delay.
Continuing on to the present time we can see that not much has vastly changed; the negatives and positives may be further discussed, but nevertheless, this inherent doctrine of expediency has made its home in the US and became the contributing influence of Americanism abroad.
