Samuel Goldman:

While it's not much like European nation-states, the U.S. has plenty of similarities to other post-colonial, pluralistic societies in North and South America.

Take religiosity. Despite trends toward non-affiliation, Americans' largely favorable attitudes toward religion contrast sharply with most European countries' secularism. That quality isn't specific to the U.S., though. In fact, we rank around the middle of North and South American religiosity, similar to Mexico but lower than Brazil and most Central American countries. The continental outlier isn't the U.S. but Canada, which reports the lowest religiosity in the Western hemisphere. Yet even there, 27 percent report religion is very important in their lives, more than double the rate in comparably rich parts of Europe.

Murder rates are another good illustration. Here too, the U.S. resembles our neighbors more than our European cousins. Our national murder rate of around five homicides per 100,000 inhabitants is about four times that of the United Kingdom, France, Germany. But it's lower than every country in the Americas except Chile, Martinique, Aruba, and Canada. (Even Greenland has a higher murder rate than we do.)

And so on. Fascinating essay on the ways the U.S. more closely resembles other nations in the Americas than it does any place in Europe.