"Weird" Values

I don't care for baseball and football anymore than cricket and soccer, but still I'm impressed by our oddness.

Americans like to think of themselves as global trendsetters and standard-makers. But a raft of opinion polls since the Iraq war have demonstrated that America is not so much a trendsetter as an outlier—more individualistic, more religious, more nationalistic, more anti-government and more gung-ho about the use of force than other countries.

This evidence of American exceptionalism has provoked a fierce debate within the United States between "red" Americans, who are proud of their country's oddness, and "blue" Americans (mostly Democrats), who think that America should pay more attention to the rest of the world. It has also provoked an even fiercer backlash in other countries against America's "weird" values, such as its support for the death penalty and its predilection for unilateral action.