Okay so most European states or postcolonial states derived from their empires trace back to the punctuated shift from lords/church feudalism to national welfare state – the rise of parliaments, then language and nationality standardization, then coopted nationalism post-French Revolution/1848, then broader universal polities post World Wars

America didn’t have that trajectory. It broke free from any particular church and nobility with its Revolution at the dawn of the liberal era, but didn’t replace it with 19th century nationalism but rather a liberal system that allowed lots of local elites and dynamics.

As it expanded in the 19th century it built a syncretic “white” nation but also a “black” one of imported slaves-later-serfs and excluded populations of “Native Americans” and “white ethnics” (incorporated into “white” by the 1960s, also “Asians” out west)

The state consolidated power in the Civil and World Wars and their following occupations, but the “New Deal” of the 1930s was probably the closest attempt to replicate the European national-welfare state

Loyalists of the old system never accepted this, you could hear sponsoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt declaimed as tyrant like Trump is now into the 1990s, he really did break through a lot of norms and established systems (like taking 4 terms, not accepting Supreme Court rebuke, intervening in matters not traditionally considered eligible for government involvement, choking off rival media with the “Mayflower Compact” and paper rationing)

They constituted the “conservative” tendency and ever since, they built up with the aim of undoing the illegitimate New Deal and never allowing such a thing again. Starting in the 1970s they incorporated resistance to the “Civil Rights” movement which sought to raise the “black” nation to parity with the “white” one, the conservatives through the Republican Party started to earn electoral power in 1994 and are now at a maximum.

So, there has never been established a consensus that the US state owes anything to the “American people” as such, rather than an “American system” in which certain people might thrive, OR that the “black” nation is equally legitimate and American as the “white” one, and the legitimately elected government is dedicated to opposing both notions as an existential matter at ANY human or PR cost.