Churchyard (National Lies: questions)

Why were the Founding Fathers repelled by their new nation in all its major aspects—business, politics, religion, culture, and manners? (Ch. 1)
Why does individualism as an ideal trump any ideal of community? (Ch. 2)
Why have Americans in general and workers in particular refused to recognize the significance of social class? (Ch. 2)
Why do Americans believe that the free market is naturally beneficent and government is naturally obstructive if not outrightly pernicious? (Ch. 3)
Why does religion play such a prominent part in American life, far more than in other Western countries? (Ch. 3)
Why is America’s optimistic idealism continually getting the nation into prolonged and agonizing imbroglios like Prohibition, Vietnam, and Iraq? (Ch. 3)
Foreign critics have accused Americans of being puritans as well as pornographers. Why are they right on both counts, and how are Americans able to play both roles? (Ch. 4)
How can a person be a conservative in the United States, dominated as it is by progressive attitudes and ideology? (Ch. 4)
How are American friendliness and American competitiveness able to arise from the same source? (Ch. 5)
Foreign critics have called Americans individualists and conformists. Why are both characterizations accurate, and how have Americans succeeded in combining the two? (Ch. 5)
How could America, being an agglomeration of self-interested and self-indulgent individualists, attain a unity of purpose and a spirit of self-sacrifice superior to that which totalitarian societies like the Soviet Union or Communist China were able to command from their citizens? (Ch. 5)
How are Americans able to reconcile their idealistic belief in individual freedom with the social reality of group influence and control? The answer to this question furnishes the key to the entire national conundrum. (Ch. 6)
The corporation, as a large business organization, has been responsible for most of the country’s power and prosperity. Why have Americans nevertheless continued to dislike and distrust it? (Ch. 7)
Why does the new workplace in today’s economy impose entrepreneurial demands and liabilities on its employees, while it fails to offer entrepreneurial rewards? (Ch. 7)
What is the relationship between the free market in economic relations and the free market in sexual relations? (Ch. 8)
How did the Great Depression of the 1930s influence the character of every subsequent decade through the rest of the century (including the placid 1950s and the tumultuous 1960s)? (Ch. 8)
Why do idealists of the left love the people at the very bottom of society but loathe those on the level just above the bottom? (Ch. 9)
Why do liberal and radical causes find their greatest support among the affluent rather than among the disadvantaged, who are their intended beneficiaries? Why do the latter so often fail to respond to the advocacy of the former? (Ch. 9)
How did Abraham Lincoln’s compassion for the unfortunate differ from Bill Clinton’s, and what is the significance of this difference? (Ch. 9)
Why do people today desperately want to believe that the world is becoming more diverse, when it is actually becoming more uniform? (Ch. 9)
Why are some academics producing the verified knowledge and trained experts that the contemporary world needs to continue functioning at a high level of efficiency, while other academics are questioning and deriding the very concepts of knowledge, merit, progress, and even reality? (Ch. 10)
Why was there a striking and controversial difference between the response of ordinary citizens to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the response of many in the cultural and intellectual elite? (Ch. 10)
Why is race such an intractable and obsessive problem for Americans? (Ch. 10)