I think there is some truth to this:
[America’s] maturation rites are compounded of equal parts nihilism and idealism, and we have always smashed our icons with other icons. Young Americans have immemorially been as uncritical in their surrender to the present as they are ruthless in their repudiation of the past, and a disorderly, eruptive process of individuation, whose first requirement seems to be a weaning-by-excess, is a tradition so unbroken and so peculiar to us that America’s senescence may only be said to have arrived when it no longer produces successive generations-in-revolt.
John Clellan Holmes.