Seriously, our constitution was literally written to embolden a minority of slave owners and make sure that the people could not hold them accountable due to the structure of the government.

It was always a colonial white nationalist state and it took a civil war + second founding before people weren't treated as property. It then took nearly another 100 years before all peoples in this country could vote.

We're literally the first generation of Americans who grew up with nearly total emancipation + universal suffrage and we still have people fighting to bring back polling taxes and removing citizenship.

Unfortunately this is true. Around a year, or two years ago the WaPo (back before it was a total shill, yes it was still bad but... you know) had an article about how all the rhetoric from the far right in the US was almost, word for word, what was said a little more than 100 years ago. It was downright scary. Some part of the US has _always_ been that way. Maybe someone can find the article.

You’re right that this has always existed and at times even driven governance and society in the US.

There’s also been times when other values more like what the GP implies have driven governance and social direction in the US. There was a side with values like that in the civil war. There was government and there were movements with those values for much of the 20th century especially following periods of national trial when it was clear we needed governing values that truly drove the common welfare.

A lot of us grew up and are still living with the fruits of that. That’s the America we’ve known. We’ve also always known that there are many Americans who never bought in, who had a vision more like the other side of the civil war, or want welfare that’s a bit more unevenly distributed, perhaps not even distributed in some directions at all.

It can still be a bit of a shock to find out that illiberal portion growing with a grip on a growing number of levers of power.

Can the America with a vision of truly common welfare reassert itself? Maybe. Maybe not.