If you can imagine what a crowd of people waiting for Walmart's Black Friday sale behaves like... I think that's a great metaphor for America at large.

Poor social cohesion, poverty traps, excessive materialism and individualism.

I blame Cold War domestic propaganda tactics. Americans stigmatized and undermined cultural values for a generation, the societal equivalent of an autoimmune disease, and ever since we have been shifting further towards a brutal, cold, almost purely economic system with sparse and weakly connected communities made up of individuals constantly bombarded by news and ads (propaganda).