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Notes -
America's main source of competitive advantage is software*. Making software is literally symbol manipulation.
Arguably America's second-largest source of competitive advantage is logistics, which is real-world-aligned, but doesn't have the mythopoetic status of manufacturing in real-world-aligned culture, and in any case naturally encourages people towards cosmopolitanism and has done since the Age of Sail, if not earlier. (Walmart and Amazon are the leading examples of American excellence in logistics, as well as notoriously harmful to local communities.)
Compared to resource extraction, manufacturing, or even tourism (where the local sense of place is part of what you are selling), software and logistics are about unmoored, placeless economic activity. This is true both of the doing of the thing, and of the type of financial services that finance the doing of the thing - financialisation is not the problem here. When America was a physical-things country, you had community banks which were as embedded in their community as the general store, and which financed farms and factories and such-like, and you had money-centre banks like JP Morgan which financed railroads and shipping.
* America's trillion-dollar companies and their core competencies are:
None of these are going to promote rooted capitalism, and none of them would promote rooted socialism if State-owned either.
It wouldn't be wrong to say that the entire point of logistics is the abstraction away of place.
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