The US is what happens when a small group of economic/political competitors get a thinly-populated continent for free. The rights and freedoms emphasis makes total sense in a context where you have what seem like unlimited resources by individual human standards. World population in 1776 was under 1 billion and in Europe it was about 150m, or 1/3 of today's.
It's unwise for Americans to stay so mentally anchored to this origin story. It's not that it doesn't have value, but it has increasingly less to do with reality because it depends on a condition of superabundance that no longer obtains.
