The smartest people in a backwoods country did what was thought impossible a couple of times. They defeated the British, and then after the Disaster that was the Articles of Confederation, established a written constitution that quite literally took their ideas from the Reformation, Natural Rights, and individual liberty and tempered it to withstand the man's worker instincts. They created a four page document that not only created the legal framework to establish a nation but also provided the necessary cohesion to keep rival cultures, and opposing religions working cooperatively toward a better future.
The model of European governance is that God shined his grace upon a king who then decided what rights the people got. With The Constitution was enshrined the model of governance that God gave all the rights to man, and it was man that decided what limited rights were given to the State.
They did all of this recognizing their own imperfections, and providing a way for their own creation, The Constitution, to be amended. That document, amended 27 times, still stands as the governing document for our country.
What the founding fathers did was quite astounding.
It helps that they were all in one place at one time. Imagine if King Richard the lion hearted, Henry III, Stephen Hawking, Elizabeth I, Lord Nelson, Alan Turing, Benjamin Disraeli, Churchill, Thatcher, William Wallace, Newton, and Richard Branson all got together and said let us make a new country and they all hammered out their ideas and despite their own egos managed to create a structure wherein they all agreed. And it worked! And 231 years later it was still working.
:liberty-weeping:
Yeah, but still a bunch of French, German, Italian and Romansh-speaking Catholics and Protestants managing to all agree to not kill each other and remain an alliance of republican city states for hundreds of years is pretty cool. Sure there wasn't a massive national identity, but America doesn't really have a national identity beyond the weird founder worship.
If only you knew there were like 5 wars between the catholics and the protestants the Sonderbund War which was the latest one was in 1800s and the reason why it managed to remain an alliance was mostly due to that region just being generally poor hence why swiss mercenaries were a thing back then because poor people make good cannon fodder.