The Cultural Paradoxes the United States Faces after 9/11 Zhu Shida(40) The paper discusses in a histropositivistic approach the stress and strain the United States faces after September 11 in issues related to the relations between its neoimperialist status and its basic democratic values. The United States has reexamined the pros and cons of open society and has tightened its immigration policy. This poses a threat to its very feature — a society of immigrants from different cultures. The president has expanded its power, and the balance between the administration and the Congress is well challenged. To limit civil liberties under the name of the war on terrorism is to limit the core of American value. The religious claims by international terrorists, coupled with the religious impulse within American culture, has thrown the United States into a cultural fix. However, the author argues, they should be attributed more to its Weberian “acquisitive morality,” its sense of manifest destiny and the universalistic Americanism.