Excellent piece. I agree with most of your takeaways, but one line struck me:

> Israel, where faith in institutions survives

You mention that corporations are the last functional institution most Americans encounter. I agree with this, but, outside the military and religion, I don't think Americans have really ever experienced functional non-business institutions in the way we talk about them today (political machines like Tammany Hall were arguably extremely functional institutions, but I don't think they'd count in today's parlance). The history of America seems mostly defined by its lack of institutions, allowing (or forcing, depending on your point of view) for the ambitious to just do the job that needed to be done, for better or worse. The other defining feature seems to be that America has _always_ been bad at building large scale institutions. The crowning achievement of Hamilton (who was more interested in building state capacity than any still influential founder) was a central bank, which barely outlasted some of his peers (followed by a century of banking panics). There was arguably a brief respite during WWII and the Cold War, though much of those effective institutions were either military or primarily private (and people like my grandfather, whose ranch in central Washington was simply appropriated for Manhattan Project testing might disagree about the positive impact of this time of briefly "effective" institutions).

The striking thing to me, as I read more and more American history, is that the secularization of much of America (I'm one of those secularized Americans, by the way) removed the institution that actually tried to solve the problems that we now ask our governments to address (but expect them to fail at): religion, and the community fostered by it.