At the most basic level, the answer is simple. American culture today is not a Triple Package culture. On the contrary, the Triple Package runs directly counter to major tenets—almost mantras—of contemporary American thinking. That’s why Triple Package groups do so well in the United States. Triple Package groups have an edge in America precisely because America as a whole lacks the Triple Package. But in reality, the story is much more complicated—for two reasons. First, nations aren’t groups. A nation as large and diverse as America can’t be analyzed the same way that an ethnic or religious group can. America doesn’t have only cultural variety. It has culture wars: protracted, impassioned debates about the country’s basic values. Second, there is the fact of historical change. As we’ll show below, America’s relationship to the Triple Package has shifted dramatically in the nearly two and a half centuries since the nation’s birth.
