Did Scandinavia become welfare states because individualists came to the U.S.?
slate.com
slate.com
'The cowards never started and the weaklings died on the way.' That was the spirit that crossed the plains, and such was the spirit of every emigrant who left Europe. There is good blood in your veins, compadre!"
This is why the American ideal of "rugged individualism" is a myth: like any group of humans in life-or-death circumstances, American pioneers became collectivists. Failure to do your part for the group jeopardized the entire group, and was met with harsh punishment.
Even if such a definition had any validity, the group was voluntary and was small enough that individual accountability was immediately enforceable. Deviation from the contract once signed was punished by death (effectively). In addition, failure to sign on didn't have a group hunting you down and punishing you. As a final note, those groups were temporary -- a means to an end at which point the individual family unit again reigned supreme.
To be comparable with the common political view, every person would have to agree to join, he arrangement would be temporary, the punishment for violation would be death, and choosing not to join would not be a disadvantage.
Different environments result in, over time, different ideologies— humans follow a typical evolutionary path with this, but the adjustments in this case are mental rather than physical.
I love to take risk, but some of my family is from the Soviet Union, and they're extremely risk-averse. Their idea of success in life is to have a stable career as a doctor, lawyer, or engineer.
One ideology isn't inherently better, it's just about which ideology is better suited for which environment. If I were placed in the Soviet Union, I would probably die quickly with my risk tolerance. Meanwhile, while their recipe for conservative success produces solid results in the United States, I would argue that a higher tolerance for risk would produce a better average performance.
The most critical part of this lasting is, of course, what percent of that ideology is inherited rather than questioned... how 'sticky' that culture is, when applied to the immigrant's children. While complex, this is often a function of the closeness of the family unit in that given culture.
The US ran out of frontier around the turn of the 20th century. And this is problematic, because no populations is going to stay as risk-tolerant and ambitious as the population that already risked their lives to travel there in the first place. Immigration might actually refresh these attitudes, but you’d expect them to erode over time. Perhaps they have.
Individualism wasn't responsible for the poverty, lack of land for newborns, depressions, war and political oppression that caused Europeans to move to the U.S.
Not to mention the 'agents' of U.S. companies looking for workers who were sent to Europe to promise the 'individualists' anything. Or the Homestead Act ... it's pretty hard to get more socialistic than more-or-less giving away a quarter-acre of land to all comers in return for a weak promise.