Over time (until 1965) the US accepted immigrants from other European countries–Irish, Poles, Germans, Dutch, Italians, Scandinavians. The immigration system turned these immigrants into Americans, essentially Englishmen, as English views of law, politics, and history were inherited by the English colonies that became  the United States. Immigrants had to learn English, pass a test on the Constitution, and be turned into Americans, an amalgam of white European ethnicities.

It was easy to turn Europeans into Americans.  All Europeans shared mores based in Christianity.  Their histories were interwoven. All had an aristocratic heritage. However dishonorable some individual aristocrats might have been, for the aristocratic class honor was a meaningful concept that restrained dishonorable tendencies.  

Aristocratic mores filtered down into the population. They were still present in Britain in the 1960s when I was a student at Oxford University. There was no assurance that people would behave correctly, but there were no excuses for those who did not. 

In modern times it was the English who resurrected democracy.  The English were more pragmatic about it than the French idealists.  England's preeminence in the world–the sun never set on the English Empire–gave the world the idea of the rule of law to which the government was subservient. It was the English who established the idea that government is accountable to the people and not vice versa.

This great accomplishment has been eroded by the ever-weakening minds of Western liberals, who created a system in which government bosses the people in order to improve them and society. Not even monarchs were this arrogant.