Alexis de Tocqueville amazes me. He has amazed me's for 180 years (Now sitting in my underwear). The guy was 26 years old when he came to America. Spent nine months here, not nine years, nine months. And yet, despite his callowness, despite his brief stay, saw most penetratingly into the American soul. He found our letters and read them aloud.

As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions, but it is himself. The consequence is, that his national pride resorts to a thousand artifices, and to all the petty tricks of individual vanity. 

Nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of life that this irritable patriotism of the Americans. 
...
...America is therefore a free country, in which, lest anybody should be hurt by your remarks, you are not allowed to speak freely of... the State, of the citizens or of the authorities, of public or of private undertakings, or, in short, of anything at all, except it be of the climate and the soil; and even then Americans will be found ready to defend either the one or the other, as if they had been contrived by the inhabitants of the country.

-Democracy in America 283.