> If you took 1,000 people like my wife and put them on an island, you'd recreate America--including the parts of America I find perplexing and frustrating. I'm not persuaded that if you took 1,000 people like me and put them on an island you'd recreate America.

That depends on the constituents of your sample. I doubt a city girl from New York and a farm boy from East Tennessee would have the same approach to life in this hypothetical thousand-person colony. They'll likely work and trade together as needed, but they would otherwise form and primarily associate with their own sociopolitical milieu, thus forming cultural enclaves.

In short, I don't think you could really create another USA without the historical happenstances, upheavals, and transformations that changed country from a collection of colonies primarily divided on religious grounds to a unified secular republic.