"A discourse of individual rights is compatible with American principles, but it's a real stretch to make them conform to anything collective (or secular). Competitive individualism seems so deeply ingrained into our common sense that I can't imagine how you'd break out of it. So much of American populism has centered on a critique of monopoly, the offense being the restriction of free competition, the unexamined virtue. It's in Naderism, it's in a lot of Green politics, it's in the anti-Wal-Mart movie, it's everywhere."
Me:
I came into this a little late because of email tech problems. I often think the "American individualism" versus "collective socialist future" dichotomy is overblown if not artificially counterposed.
Corporations, the nation-state, the patriarchal family, and the military are all collectives many Americans love. Loved so much so that they're not even thought of as "collectives," because that term is supposed to apply only to things that are dull, gray, zombified if not Stalinist, where you might as well be marching lock step with similarly mindless comrades. Unlike a Fortune 500 company or your local church, where you don't do that.
American elites selectively apply their criticism of collectives to those that might upset their privilege. So a union is a Borg-like "collective," but a corporation is a place where romantic individualism runs free. An acquaintance's father steered his son free of a grocery market's UFCW local for the metaphysical reason than in the union he waould "lose his sense of individuality." Unlike working at the grocery story as a bagger/stock boy, where he'd ostensibly realize his individuality's full flourishing.
-B.