I'm basically arguing
Louis Hartz's fragment theory here, from his book:
The Liberal Tradition in America.
Essentially whenever a colonial nation broke free of Europe—that's their political ideology.
Restoration, Not Renovation: A Fresh Start for Hartz-Horowitz might also be interesting reading.
(
Horowitz is the guy that applied Hartz's theories to Canada and, incidentially, coined the term "
Red Tory" so the Conservative "Tory" Party post-WWII could be seen both as American imported (and business elites of Montreal and Toronto) classical liberals "
Blue Tories" and the old
One-Nation Conservatism "Red Tories". Charles Taylor came up with my preferred term (as I am one): "Radical Tory". Eventually, of course, us Radical Tories lost entirely to the classical liberals.)
I'm not really convinced of the entirety of the notion 1) that conservatism is about group rights and community (multicultrualism?) and 2) that America lacks such a notion. For one, the former is a prima facie description of Southern fire-eaters and States' Rights.
Not multiculturalism, surely, in Canada at least that's the invention of Trudeau. Before 1967 Canada's policy was, as I like to call it, a tapestry: you didn't have to assimilate American style, you were not allowed to set up your own independent enclaves that multiculturalism has wound up being, and in the end your culture became a piece of the broader Canadian culture.
And of course the South had the greatest number of Loyalists, and hence the greatest number of conservatives. You can trace people like Governor Huckabee back to that, albeit with a far stronger religious flavour than conservatism in other countries and deeply contaminated by the predominant American classical liberalism.
In the broadest possible sense a conservative thinks: group rights are more important than individual rights (
communitarianism &
collectivism)[1], change should be slow, the government is a force for good and the free market is important.
In the broadest possible sense a liberal thinks: individual rights are more important than group rights, change should be as fast as they feel like it, and the government is inferior to the free market.
In the broadest possible sense a socialist thinks: group rights are more important than individual rights, change should be fast, and the government is a force for good while the free market sucks.
[1] To answer your question think of it this way: "if one person plays loud music, for the good of the community should he be forced to stop?". Conservatives and socialist would say yes, a liberal would argue he has a right to play his music loud. It's not in the sense of different cultures (though, certainly, neither the UK nor Canada followed the American melting pot model), but more in the sense of, say, a small town as a whole having rights over the people living in it beyond the legal ones.
Now, I agree, that a successful American socialism will be a lot different than any form of European or Asian socialism. Indeed, one reason I think socialism faired so poorly is that it had few American intellectual champions (hence, Turtledove in order to create a Socialist party had to turn Lincoln into America's Marx). Secondly, American political parties have never turned on ideologies (and still don't no matter what CNN tells you). Thirdly, you'd need to keep American Socialism from embracing atheism (though some forms of Christian Socialism might do quite well).
While, American political parties didn't turn on ideology because they're all classical liberal until FDR's introduction of European-imported social democracy and because post-Civil War pre-Nixon the South being Democratic and the Republicans needing progressives forced both parties to be broad tents.
Pretty clearly they've shaken out so the Democrats are moderate (i.e. government-market balance) classical liberals trending towards social democracy while the Republicans are free market classical liberals leavened with a weird blend of libertarians and social conservatives (lately social conservatives plus neo-conservatives have kinda obscured the old smaller government thing of Newt and co., or Reagan).
Social conservatives being some of the last pieces of the old Southern Loyalists, of course, and as you pointed it the South is the only piece of the US that could be called conservative…*albeit weirdly altered by being set in a dominant classical liberal setting, over-reliant on religion, and torn apart by the race issue. Which is why they don't much resemble conservative elsewhere.