"A huge chunk of the world" and "literally every human being throughout history" are very different things. Like I said, a problem is potentially solvable politically if you have at least one constructive proof of people not doing that. If you don't, though, then it's likely one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal.
If, for some reason, you thought that—to use a random example from the list—people having names was a bad thing, would you try to use politics to get people to stop naming their children? No; that'd be insane. People aren't going to give up doing that as long as they're still human beings in any sense we recognize. Even if you outlaw it, they'll still do it; it'll just be a secret.
Same goes for many good things, but also for many bad things. You'll never be able to erase the human concept of e.g. people having things that are more "theirs" than someone else's (even in a communist totalitarian regime) or sexual jealousy (even if there's a central educational authority raising everyone polyamorous), or arbitrary etiquette fads (even in the context of a concrete replacement for them, like a military code of conduct) or people valuing kin over strangers (even if Effective Altruism propaganda were to be broadcast from loudspeakers on every corner.) You can't make a world without these things in them, without making a world without humans as we know them in them.
There are problems amenable to politics. Maybe most problems. But some problems just... aren't. (These problematic aspects of humanity may be amenable to other solutions—potentially many! It's just that a political solution requires the majority of people to want it; and, by the fact that these are universals, the majority of humans will never want them gone.)
Yes, cultural universals exist, but in the interest of staying on topic, you'll notice a distinct difference between e.g. people having names, and things on zanny's list or cultures that work overtime too much.
I don't know, both bigotry and "[culture] exceptionalism" map pretty well to the cultural universals of "Collective identities" + "Binary cognitive distinctions".
Which is, again, why I think zanny was being downvoted: wishing people could get over wanting to work overtime, and wishing human brains would stop categorizing things and then assigning the categories themselves moral worth, are very different kinds of wish, that don't really feel like they should be in the same kind of list. The latter kind of thing can't be described with "a problem with American culture", because that's not the level it exists at.
Sure "otherness" is universal, but in a world where e.g. people of Irish descent used to be considered "other" by "normal" white people, I think there's empirical evidence we can still make progress.
If, for some reason, you thought that—to use a random example from the list—people having names was a bad thing, would you try to use politics to get people to stop naming their children? No; that'd be insane. People aren't going to give up doing that as long as they're still human beings in any sense we recognize. Even if you outlaw it, they'll still do it; it'll just be a secret.
Same goes for many good things, but also for many bad things. You'll never be able to erase the human concept of e.g. people having things that are more "theirs" than someone else's (even in a communist totalitarian regime) or sexual jealousy (even if there's a central educational authority raising everyone polyamorous), or arbitrary etiquette fads (even in the context of a concrete replacement for them, like a military code of conduct) or people valuing kin over strangers (even if Effective Altruism propaganda were to be broadcast from loudspeakers on every corner.) You can't make a world without these things in them, without making a world without humans as we know them in them.
There are problems amenable to politics. Maybe most problems. But some problems just... aren't. (These problematic aspects of humanity may be amenable to other solutions—potentially many! It's just that a political solution requires the majority of people to want it; and, by the fact that these are universals, the majority of humans will never want them gone.)